Making Sense with Sam Harris
#454 — More From Sam: Minnesota, Greenland, Iran, S**thole Countries, and More
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Okay, we're back with another episode of More From Sam. Hi, Sam. Hey, good to see you. Good to see you as well. Once again, I just want to quickly remind everyone that you will be giving talks in a number of cities in North America this year. This week, we have LA, which is sold out. Congrats. That'll be fun.
And then coming up, we have Dallas, Austin, Portland, Vancouver, Toronto, DC, and ending in New York City again. So if you want to see Sam, now is the time to do it. While touring can be a lot of fun, it's also hard work, not to mention you have to stand up there for
nearly two hours straight. Yeah. Yeah. The talk keeps getting longer. I keep trying to cut it back, but events happen. So yeah. Yeah.
I've learned to stop making any suggestions. I keep asking you to cut 15 minutes and you add 15 minutes. So I'm just going to be quiet, but it's a great show and it's a cool experience to see you deliver it live. And anyone wanting to buy tickets can head over to samharris.org now, and you can find all the info there. Okay, so many things happening that I don't even know where to begin.
From Rene Good, ICE in general, Greenland, tariffs on the EU for intervening in Greenland, the potential collapse of NATO, and I haven't even gotten to Iran, and Venezuela and Maduro might as well have happened a year ago.
I think that was just like two weeks ago. I mean, it's been an incredible two weeks. Yeah, I know.
Yeah, well, it seems like the Epstein files have successfully fallen out of the news again. And do we even have time to cover the latest round of antisemitism? Plus, I want to get your take on prediction markets and gambling apps, the latest on AI and discuss Ben Shapiro's appearance on Gavin Newsom's podcast and anything you hope to discuss with Ben when he's on your podcast next month and more.
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Chapter 2: What recent events in Minneapolis sparked national discussions?
There's a sense of completely unprofessional contempt being expressed for half of American society. The framing of everything is that we have an enemy within and we are now going to war against that enemy. And the enemy within is basically everyone who didn't vote for Trump and who isn't going to ratify his excesses at every turn.
If you saw this happening in any other society, you could safely assume that those people were living under a dictatorship. This is not hyperbole. I mean, I'm not saying we live under a dictatorship, you know, fully achieved at this point. But what we're seeing in the streets of Minneapolis and what we're seeing communicated from the Oval Office on down is fascist style governance.
There's just no question about that.
Yeah, and according to Damon Linker's article, the Substack piece, which the main point was that whatever you think you're seeing in the media, it's worse. I mean, it seems like every quote said something to the effect of the media is just not conveying to you just how awful this is. And so whatever you just said and whatever you think we know, it's worse on the ground, apparently.
Yeah. It's hard to know what to do about it. I mean, obviously, I think people need to keep protesting. They should try to do that as safely as possible. So let's say the other side of this. Let's just bend over backwards to be charitable to ICE and the Trump regime.
There's no question that some of what protesters do is unwise and illegal and almost certainly unnecessary to express their free speech opposition to what's happening. So, I mean, I'm sure there are maneuvers with people's cars, blocking traffic, and it's still uncertain to me just what Renee Goode was doing that was illegal or not. But let's just price all of that in.
Let's just say this is, you know, to some degree, you know, the fuck around and find out principle is operative. You shouldn't be doing dangerous, illegal things in order to protest. Okay, great. But what she clearly wasn't doing was trying to run over cops with her car. There was no reason to escalate this situation.
This was not a situation that had to be violent, that was running off the rails.
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Chapter 3: What are the humanitarian concerns regarding Iran?
ICE officers weren't being threatened by anyone. They came in so aggressively and were shouting contradictory commands. Whatever you think about the first shot, I still think that was unjustifiable. But even if you're going to bend over backwards and say, all right, this is an officer who perceived any movement of the car to be imperiling his life.
I mean, first of all, moron that he is, he's walking in front of the car. He actually thought he was in a hostile situation. Why would you walk in front of a car like that? You simply wouldn't. This is bad training, bad recruitment. Bad common sense. But just leave that aside. And what is he doing with his phone, right? He's making his own home movies of the situation.
What are these ICE guys doing with their phones? I've heard that some of them are using facial recognition. Maybe that's the case. That's also a little weird and dystopian if they're running around doing facial recognition on everybody. We should have a public conversation about that. But again, leave that aside. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
He found himself in front of somebody's car. It started moving. He thought, again, idiotically, that the best way to stop a moving car, to keep yourself safe from it, is to shoot the driver at close range. I can't imagine any training suggests that's the case. But in any case, within a second, he was to the side of the car
not at all in harm's way, and then delivered two more shots to Renee Good and, you know, kind of ensuring that she was dead. The purpose of those shots were not self-defense. This is not a fleeing fugitive who has, you know, several murders on her record, and you know she's a threat to the public, right?
So it's just, there's nothing about this that makes sense from a law enforcement point of view, and yet you have people I mean, forget about all the liars and maniacs who are calling her a terrorist and Trump said the guy was in the hospital and lucky to be alive, right? That's the level of communication, but forget about all that.
There's still people right of center defending this as somehow a kind of normative policing that we want our law enforcement to come in this hot. And if you simply don't obey them, you have fucked around sufficiently so as to lose your life, right? I mean, that's basically the center of narrative gravity over there. It's insane.
And again, it's coming from people who, from the right, these people who get radicalized by every, or at least heretofore got radicalized by every overreach of federal power, right? I mean, think of Ruby Ridge that radicalized the entire far right for a generation. Or Waco, right? I mean, this is what got Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building, right?
It's like any intrusion of the feds coming into our lives. And what the feds are doing now is stopping traffic randomly and hauling people out of cars who are just driving home from work and throwing them on the pavement, restraining them and beating them up after they've been restrained. It's awful.
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