Sam Harris

it's almost impossible to exaggerate how confused some people are and how fully their lives are organized around that confusion.

I mean, there are people who think that the world's being run by pedophile cannibals and that, you know, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals.

I mean, like they're,

Adjacent to the pure crazy, there's the semi-crazy.

And adjacent to the semi-crazy, there's the grifting opportunist asshole.

And the layers of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose.

But the problem is...

All of this is getting signal boosted by an outrage machine that is preferentially spreading misinformation.

It has a business model that is guaranteeing that it is preferentially sharing misinformation.

You have to understand.

Part of it, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things.

I mean, I think that there's, and I'm sure there's some number of people

who are just pretending to believe these things because it's just, again, this is sort of like the 4chanification of everything.

It's just Pepe the Frog, right?

Like none of this is what it seems.

They're not signaling an alliance with white supremacy or neo-Nazism, but they're not not doing it.

Like they just don't fucking care.

It's just cynicism overflowing its banks, right?

It's just fun to wind up the normies, right?

Like, look at all the normies who don't understand that a green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn't just a green frog, right?