Over the years Sam Harris has had many legitimate gripes about bad actors (ahem, Reza Aslan) knowingly taking him out of context in bad faith
This time around, he did say this and it actually comes off better without the full context of what he said.
I've read enough Sam Harris and listened to him enough that simply seeing this meme, I would figure that it's a lie or that he was simply being hyperbolic.
To an extent, I would have been right about the hyperbole part; but, damn it, I wouldn't have been right enough.
Now, look, I do recommend watching the full Triggernometry interview and getting full context after that, if you call yourself a liberal and you find yourself thinking that Harris was making sense during this discussion, you've gotta turn in your liberal card.
First of all, I don't care if the Hunter Biden laptop thing were truly a "nothingburger" as a lot of people claim. Corporations suppressing reports, literally to the point of preventing users to share the report in DMs, out of party loyalty is not acceptable behavior. There's nothing liberal about supporting the practices. Even if the report were a nothingburger, you made something of it because the corporate restriction of potentially relevant information regarding a presidential election is something in and of itself.
What's more, Harris went on to suggest that the same thing should have been done with the Hillary scandal in 2016 -- that information should have been withheld from us plebs by our corporate and government overlords until after our overlords got the outcome that they wanted.
No matter how you slice this, to agree with Harris on this issue, you have to be experiencing a sense of self-love that even Robert Heinlein couldn't fathom. To fancy yourself a liberal and agree with Harris's sentiments is to operate in the world as if principles mean nothing to you.
Now, this specific quote is bad enough in a vacuum. In context, Harris may claim to have simply been using hyperbole to make his point. Still, Harris is a smart guy and he knows that there are vast numbers of people who have enough irrational hatred toward Trump and Republicans in general that they would agree with this statement unironically.
This is also a tactical disaster for regressive leftists that agree with Harris. You can't call right-wingers paranoid and stupid when somebody that you've already been accusing of being too far to the right said, in no uncertain terms, that there was a motive to steal the election. Once you tell people that you have the motive, it's not unreasonable for people to question whether you had the means and the opportunity.
So, did Harris actually mean that it wouldn't matter to him if Hunter Biden had corpses of children in his basement despite him walking it back a bit later?
Well, since he didn't shut his gob, I think it's reasonable to believe that he does believe the quote.
Really, he can't imagine anything scandal that could be dug up by investigating Biden's son that would be worse than Trump University?
I mean, first of all, establishing an institution that people pay to attend in order to receive instruction that they're falsely led to believe will increase their competence in the work and actually just fills the students' heads with useless bullshit while leaving them in debt and with no added earning power basically sounds like 90% of higher Ed to me. I can think of worse scandals.
Would Harris not see it as a scandal if Joe were taking kickbacks from Hunter's dealings in Ukraine at a time when we're spending billions of dollars in military support to Ukraine?
But, it goes deeper than that.
If Harris absolutely believes his statement that Trump is comparable to an asteroid (presumably a world killer) barreling toward us that can only be stopped by a "warranted conspiracy" (his words) than one could argue that a basement full of dead kids can be something that we acknowledge later.