#381 — Delusions, Right and Left

0:29Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. And therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

0:44Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. The tractor beam of politics is continuing to exert its pull on everything. I actually watched less of the Democratic National Convention than the Republican one, though I saw enough to be encouraged. I'm happy with Harris's apparent pivot to the center. Whether she can credibly maintain that under questioning by journalists remains to be seen. I'm hopeful that she can. But I think the debates will probably matter a lot, at least they present the possibility of being decisive. I think a lot can happen there, for good or for ill. But one point I would make, this is a point I have made to some of my friends who will be voting for Trump.

1:40You might be surprised that I have friends who will be voting for Trump, but I actually have some close ones. The moves that are generally used to discount the crazier things he says he will do can be used even more plausibly to discount the crazy things that Kamala Harris has said, right? I mean, if you can not take Trump literally or even seriously when he says that he's going to round up 20 million undocumented workers, that is fruit pickers and restaurant workers and nannies and millions of people who are doing indispensable work in our economy. He's going to round them all up in, what, concentration camps, using the military, and deport them.

2:31Just linger over the details here for a moment and realize that millions of these people, quite literally millions of these people, have children who are themselves American citizens, right? If you can discount this phantasmagorically unethical and counterproductive fantasy of a policy as just political pandering and pablum messaging to his fanatical base, and perhaps you can, well then why can't you discount Harris's ridiculous and obviously unworkable idea of imposing a wealth tax. Does anyone think she's going to do that? I don't. But it's interesting, the bar for political integrity and honesty moves as you move left of center.

3:25If she actually knows she can't do such a thing, it's absolutely outrageous for her to make such a campaign promise. But right of center, nobody cares. Everyone apparently takes what Trump claims he will do with a grain of salt. Anyway, Vice President Harris will not be able to avoid hard questions forever. Certainly some will come up in the debate if she declines to hold a press conference or do long-form interviews before then. And I am reasonably hopeful that she will find the center of our politics and stake her claim there. More to come on politics and even in today's conversation. Today I'm speaking with Stephen Bunnell, otherwise known as Destiny.

4:12Stephen is a YouTuber and political streamer. His background is a little different from most of the people I've had on this podcast, but his commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online, where he stirs up controversy on both the right and the left. He grew up in a conservative Catholic household and now spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism and Trumpism in particular. He's debated some of the same people I've debated on a variety of topics, and he's debated people who I wouldn't be inclined to talk to, people like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.

4:52One of the things we discuss today is how he thinks about engaging such a wide range of characters. We talk about allegations of Trump derangement syndrome, why Trump's norm violations don't matter to so many people, people's misadventures on the information landscape, social media and the problem of being too online, our differences of emphasis when thinking about conflict in the Middle East, the difference between the far left and the far right in American politics, the lack of sane conservative policies to counterbalance the craziness of the left. whether the pendulum of sanity is swinging back on the left, the ethics and politics of giving public apologies, the maintenance of private friendships or their failure and public disagreements, and other topics.

5:43Anyway, it was a fun conversation, and now I bring you Stephen Bunnell.

5:53I am here with Stephen Bunnell. Well, Stephen, thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me, Sam. You were otherwise known as Destiny. Perhaps we should start there. Are you in the process of retiring Destiny, or are you just bouncing between both names? My background when I first started streaming forever ago was in professional gaming for StarCraft II. So I kind of went through the trouble of getting all the branding for Destiny, like the YouTube channel, the Instagram, and everything else. So it feels very difficult to give up. Really, it's nice to just have that name. So I go by, people call me Stephen in real life, and you can find my stuff online as Destiny.

6:26So I'm okay with it. Yeah, yeah. Well, so you've been very active in a part of online culture that I have had very little to do with. I mean, as you say, you got your start in gaming, but then you have become quite prominent online debating people around mostly politics, but I think you've covered a wide range of topics. How did that start for you? My mom is from Cuba. She came over when she was six. So I grew up in a very conservative household and my parents have always had very strong conservative opinions. And then going through grade school and high school, I guess I have like the debater archetype.

7:05I don't know if that's genetic or just I got it from my mom environmentally. So I've always been kind of like an argumentative, disagreeable person who's been politically interested. When I first got into streaming video games in 20, I think, like end of 2010, early 2011, the focus was video games. But we also spoke a lot about, you know, just like pop culture, philosophy, science, politics, whatever. And then in 2016, I picked it up as a much more significant part of what I did online. And you and I debated at least a few of the same people. I've debated Jordan Peterson several times. You did that at least once.

7:37I think you've also spoken to Ben Shapiro. I'm not sure how we've overlapped with other people, but I think you've spoken to people who I would avoid. I'm wondering how you make these decisions. I saw that you spoke to Nick Fuentes, who's, I think, an avowed white supremacist, if not actual Nazi. Recently, you spoke to Candace Owens. Is there anyone you regret engaging? I'll take that in two parts. So for the first one, one of my strengths is that I'm willing to talk to almost anybody. So it gives me very big reach into a lot of different types of communities because I'm willing to go into different shows and I can have a good time with a large variety of people and different types of characters, but I can still provide pushback against a large variety of different types of characters.

8:21So it's kind of a balancing act of how aggressive do I want to be versus how long do I want my legs to be? How far do I want my reach, I guess, to extend into other communities? The only times I'm disappointed or I regret engaging with people is if I feel like the other person got more out of it than I feel like I did. So for instance, if I were to platform a very small, very radical person and then not give adequate pushback. And I feel like he bested me in a conversation that I could have been more prepared for. Or if I'm, yeah, like, I just don't, I don't, I want to, I don't want to promote bad ideas and like bring them to everybody's attention and then, you know, have a bad showing against it.

8:56But if there's like, you know, really popular talking points and a lot of people believe the thing, I think it's worth discussing and I'll have those people on to fight with them. Yeah. And then the second part was if I regret, yeah, over the past year, I regretted everything. Um, God. Let's talk about that. Yeah. It's a constant balancing act between, yeah, like I said, how gentle do I want to be versus how aggressive do I want to be? I would say around the last year, I'd been making a more, I go back and forth between these very empathetic approaches to debate versus these very aggressive approaches.

9:26And so the past year, I've been more empathetic, and I've gotten conversations with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. And I worry sometimes that I play this role in like, oh, well, look, I debated Destiny and we got along and it was fine. And it's like, well, we kind of debated, but I was being very, very, very gentle because I'm trying not to make you so mad that you'll never talk to me again or that you won't have the conversation. So then when I look back at the role I played in that, and then I see now when I take more aggressive positions on things that I feel strongly about, they're like, well, I can't talk to Destiny.

9:51That guy's crazy. Candace Owens wouldn't let me in her space a week ago because she said I was a sexual deviant while she was speaking with Andrew Tate and Dan Blitzerian. I'm like, what? So now I'm like, You're in good company, or you're worse than that good company. Yeah. I mean, I watched part of your conversation with Candace, and I mean, now perhaps she has transformed into her current monstrous shape since you debated her. I haven't really followed her timeline very closely. This is one of the consequences of having gotten off social media. There are things I don't follow, which seem very big online, I'm sure.

10:28But, you know, Candace Owens becoming a proper anti-Semite was something I think I had on my bingo card some years ago. And, you know, so I was unsurprised, but I'm not quite sure when she fully pulled the mask off, if it was ever properly on. And you don't think the semi-friendly, even somewhat adversarial conversation with her just has the net effect of kind of laundering her reputation with your audience and doing more harm than good? With my audience, absolutely not. With the other audiences, that's what is so hard to determine. Like I said, I don't like the idea that Candice can say like, oh, well, you know, I had a debate with Destiny or I had a conversation with Steven.

11:11And it's like, not really. I like that was a very gentle you watch the conversation I think in around 10 minutes I realized that even then I'm pushing back too much and she's about to like yeah rage out and leave and I'm like okay well we got to be more gentle so that irritates me my audience is never becoming just because I put out so much content I stream so much I put out so many videos and have so many conversations they're not going to hear somebody like that and instantly be captivated and become whatever neo-nazi uh blexit combo of weird stuff she is now but for for audiences in the middle it's yeah I don't know it's hard to say it's good to provide some pushback like it legitimizes me and that I can talk to a lot of different people it legitimizes me in the eyes of her audience like oh well this you know Stephen's a reasonable guy that you can have conversations with but then it also plays kind of a dirty role that everybody's been complicit in over the past several years of like making some of these ideas seem a lot more reasonable and sane than they actually are and I've spent the past few months or the past month or so after the assassination attempt, yeah, saying, okay, hold on, no, let's back up.

12:10A lot of this stuff is insane, and I think we need to go back to calling this insane. Is there anyone whose name I would recognize who you've decided not to talk to because you just viewed them as too dishonest or unethical? I'll still talk to anybody, but the conversations are just going to be a lot more aggressive. I'm not going to have a conversation with Jordan Peterson while he just kind of like meanders through the point that 20 % excess deaths in Europe are all caused by the vaccine. That's not going to happen next time. Like, okay, well, we're going to sit here. We're going to fixate on this point now.

12:36Or when I asked Ben Shapiro, like, don't you guys think you grade Trump on a curve? And he's like, yeah, you know, we do. I'm like, okay, well, that can't stand, right? Yeah, I just won't let those things flow by anymore. So what have you regretted in the last year? What has been the controversy or the chaos? For some reason, I never understood that, like the media is, I always hear the media is left-wing dominated. The media is dominated by the left. And I hear that and I look online and I see kind of the crazy left. And then I look at like CNN and MSNBC. And I'm like, okay, maybe they are. But somehow, even in left-wing spaces, the conservatives have such a good brain on controlling the discourse.

13:14And I'm so upset that I allowed myself to be kind of brainwashed by the Trump derangement syndrome insult, where I'm like, okay, I got to be really fair. I got to be really careful when I cover Trump, because I don't want to sound deranged. I don't want to sound unhinged. And I'm sitting here trying to think like, okay, well, when Trump said this absolutely crazy thing, when January 6th happens. Like it was just this and that and that. And then meanwhile, the conservatives are like, so here's the 57th picture of Hunter Biden's dick that we're showing in Congress. And we know, by the way, that him and Joe Biden, you know, unilaterally dictated world policy to get rid of this prosecutor in Burisma.

13:46And it's like, oh my God, the uneven playing field, the assassination attempt, I think completely broke me when I saw how indignant conservatives are with like, you guys are calling us Nazis and look what happens. And then I'm like replaying in my mind, all the Paul Pelosi comments. And I'm like, no, this is insane. I'm sorry. You guys completely bought the farm on this. This is crazy. What do you attribute this skewing to? I mean, let's take the case of an intelligent person who is not allergic to Trump in the way that we are. I mean, I happen to know some of these people. I even have a few good friends who, you know, I would consider, I mean, this is something I say to their face, I mean, I consider them low information voters.

14:26I mean, they're simply not disposed to pay attention to all of the thousands of norm violations and other indiscretions that Trump is trailing, right? So they have a little bit in their head. They have a lot of what I would consider misinformation from the right that more or less exonerates Trump on all counts. The phrase, the Russia collusion hoax, does an inordinate amount of work in their brains. And they've essentially just averted their eyes from the whole problem. And they come away with a feeling that more or less all of the, you know, the kind of reaction that you and I have had to Trump is totally overblown.

15:05I mean, it is, you know, it is Trump derangement syndrome. It is just, we don't like the guy's personality, and we couldn't get over that. But when you look at policies, he's super normal and not even especially conservative. And, you know, much of his criticism of the powers that be and the way things were done in Washington for as long as anyone can remember, many of those criticisms are valid. There is a kind of deep state sclerosis that needs to be reamed out. They don't spend much time thinking about the actual ideologues in his orbit, you know, people like Steve Bannon and what he might say on his dumb podcast.

15:42And they just see a very clear trade-off between Trump, who is calling bullshit on obvious bullshit, like wokeism, and the moral panic on the left that has racialized everything and made it seem like trans bathrooms is the greatest human rights concern of our time, et cetera. And they're truly allergic to all the stuff that's happened on the left. And so they're willing to support Trump, warts and all. How would you perform psychic surgery on this person? So first, we have to be really clear. Are we talking about the audience or are we talking about like the larger content creators? I call them content creators.

16:22You might I call them pundits or commentators. I guess anything you would want to say to or about such a person so as to have an effect upon anyone in the audience like him or her? I think there are several really large things at play. I think one of the larger, yeah, there are several large topics at play. One of the larger ones that is hard to talk about is, I had a viewer that emailed me this with this idea, and I love this idea, and I stole it. He calls it magic boxes that if you were to go back into the past and you were to hold an abacus, okay, it's very obvious what the function of an abacus is.

16:59You can't hide any conspiracies inside of it. There are no secret cameras. There is no government listening device. Nobody's stealing your data. It's just you just see what it is and you operate it, you know, as you do. Nowadays with a phone, you don't really know everything that's going on inside of the phone. So if somebody were to say something like, I think my phone is always recording me. well to even begin to have that conversation it's like okay well do we understand you know how telemetry works how data is sent what kind of connection is needed what kind of permissions are needed like the difference between like the operating system versus an application like there's so much you have to go through that in life today we basically operate so many of these magical boxes where are on the operating level on the user level things are so abstracted away from what's actually happening that it's allowed people to insert so much craziness that can't be easily fact-checked by anything.

17:49And I find that this is especially true when you look at, my obsession lately has been, I'm trying to compile like a convincing argument relating to the January 6th stuff. So this is where my brain is kind of existing. But you might look at something like Donald Trump making a phone call to the, not to Raffensperger, but below him, an election fraud investigator in Georgia. If you have the prerequisite background to understand civics and the role of the president in a campaign and the role of a state election investigator, all of that. Just that phone call in and of itself is so unfathomably inappropriate.

18:22It is such a horrible call. But in order to even begin to understand why, you have to explain so much. And I'll be honest, even I didn't really understand. When you say that, well, there's electors and the people don't elect the president, the electors, I don't even really know what that meant until like two years ago. And most people just, yeah, I don't even, well, I know this because polling did it. Most people don't even know three branches of government, Right. So how can you even begin to explain, you know, the type of egregious norm violations that are happening when people don't know the norms, the systems that have the people just don't under have the understanding to even be able to grapple with, you know, why would it be bad for this guy to make a phone call?

18:57But that people immediately understand, like cutting children's penises off to make them trans or whatever other crazy, you know, like far left conspiracy stuff the conservatives like to obsess over. That's immediately understandable. So yeah, that's one huge thing that you have to get over, is you just need a decent foundation of knowledge to even understand why some of the things are norm-breaking. Let's focus on January 6th. What would you say to someone who thinks that January 6th was basically a non-event? I mean, it certainly wasn't an insurrection. It was a, you know, there was some sort of misbehavior on one side of the building and on the other side of the building, you know, courtesy of Tucker Carlson and others, we have, you know, we have footage of the cops just letting people in.

19:40And so, you know, was it violent? I guess if you look at the, some of the footage, it was super violent, but some of the people don't even look at that footage and they just see the people getting let in and then wandering around in what seemed to be kind of a low stress environment, right? And so that seems strange. And then there are rumors that there were, you know, FBI plants in the crowd, and maybe this whole thing was a kind of false flag thing that I heard a rumor that Pelosi didn't get enough cops there when she could have, et cetera, et cetera. So, and Trump did say from the dais, you know, that you should all be peaceful in some form.

20:18And so they, all of this, just this impressionistic tour of, you know, half-truths gives people a sense that, all right, that whatever happened over there, it was ugly, and I wouldn't have voted for it, but it wasn't really Trump's responsibility. And it was just a mob that misbehaved and American democracy wasn't at stake. How would you untangle that? I mean, it's kind of going back to what you said about, it sounds so bad to say, but like low information voters. For stuff like this, I think like two or three weeks ago, I did a little focus group because I've compiled so much information about this.

20:55And I got six pretty decently big YouTubers together. And I like went through like seven hours of information and asked them like, hey, what's the most surprising thing to you? Or what didn't you know? Or what do you care about? Or what don't you care about? And for a lot of it, it was just like so much information that people don't know. So one of the things that I was told after talking to these people so long is one thing they said is, I didn't realize the timelines at the Capitol. So for instance, people will say Donald Trump tweeted, stay peaceful, and that should be good, right? But when you actually look at everything that was happening in the day of and the context, and it's like, oh, that tweet was sent like 20 minutes after the Capitol been broken into, like an hour and a half after the Capitol grounds had been penetrated.

21:34When you start to see the tweets in context of like an actual timeline, stuff takes on a far more insidious shape than when you just say, oh, well, you know, he tweeted out, be peaceful. And, you know, who knows at what time or what part of the day. Having more facts, I think, and contextualizing things in a more appropriate way. Nobody knew anything about the elector plot, you know, like the seven fake slates of electors. And none of this is like conspiratorial. Like all the information is out there. You can see the fake slates that they all signed with their signatures. There's a YouTube video of them trying to go to the Capitol in Michigan to enter.

22:04The plot inside to have Clark replace Rosen when Rosen and Donahue are arguing with Trump about sending out a fake letter to the states about voter fraud. That was a really big one. A lot of people will say this. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard about. People say like, we don't know if Trump knew he was lying about voter fraud. How could you ever prove what's in somebody's mind? And it's like, well, let me introduce you to the entire criminal justice system of the United States, because in order to convict on crimes, you have to know what the mens rea is. That's the most important part of convicting on a crime.

22:29But for Trump, there are so many examples of somebody saying, hey, by the way, this isn't true. And then like two days later, Trump will say the exact same claim over and over and over and over and over again. He does this like so many times. And having that clearly laid out where people can say, you know what? I think Trump actually just was lying. And I think he knew the whole time, but it's a big information dump and you have to find a way to present the information in like a compelling and an interesting and like an emotional way. And then how close we were. Oh, there's two other things. How close we were on the 6 to everything failing.

22:58If Pence had flipped, if there was more violence, like there are a couple of things. Pence is the big part that didn't flip that could have. That's one thing. And then the second thing was, I didn't realize this until I was really late into my research. Oh my God, the best video that you could ever watch on January 6th is Infowars. If you really want to know the day of what people felt like and what was going on when they watched that, it's so funny because when conservatives talk about it now, they memory hole it, right? Oh, it was just some people wandering around, who cares? watching the conservative coverage and the tweets the day of, I saw, you know, like Ashley Babbitt might be the first victim of the second revolution.

23:36There was that meme video of the woman who got sprayed with mace or whatever. And she's like, we're storming the Capitol, dude. It's a revolution. You know, constantly referring to the rioters as patriots saying that they've taken the Capitol. We've overtaken it. We've got it. We've captured this back, you know, for the people. It's so obvious what everybody's saying and what's going on. And then as soon as Babbitt gets shot, the National Guard shows up, the rhetoric starts to change a bit. There are so many funny quotes. There's even like quotes from some of these guys on, I think Owen Schroer might've been one, where people are saying things like, these are patriots.

24:05This isn't BLM or Antifa. You could tell these are patriots. And then like the next day, it was all Antifa. We don't know who any of these people were. It's like, yeah. Yeah. I think the simplest cut at this for me, and I'm always surprised that it doesn't work on everybody and there's endless examples of it not working. I mean, it hasn't worked on half the country, but it really can come out in a very short paragraph, which is just that what we had was a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, I mean, months in advance of the election. And this was back in March or so, I think that the question was first put to him and he clearly declined to abide by the results of an election unless he won that election.

24:44And while the election was being run, he was clearly preparing the ground to call it fraudulent. And he then lied endlessly about having had the election stolen from him. I mean, the irony is that he's in the process of attempting to steal an election while claiming that it has been stolen from him. And in the end, we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power, right? So like that, just that single desecration of the foundational norm of our democracy, I mean, it seems to me that we don't have the laws that we actually should have in place to punish a president who does this, right? To have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power and then do what he can to ensure that we don't have one.