Sam Harris, a prominent atheist and liberal podcaster, defended Twitter's censorship of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop report just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. He admitted the censorship "absolutely" was a "conspiracy" to prevent Donald Trump from winning re-election, but argued it was justified during an interview on the Triggernometry podcast Wednesday.
"At that point, Hunter Biden could have literally had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared," Harris said of the lead up to the 2020 election.
"Whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, if we can just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine, or wherever else, or China, it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in," he continued.
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"It's like a firefly to the sun," he said as a comparison. "It doesn't even stack up against Trump University, right? Trump University as a story is worse than anything that can be in Hunter Biden's laptop."
"Now, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account, that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump - absolutely it was, absolutely. But I think it was warranted," he said.
At that point, Konstantin Kisin, one of the interviewers, interjected. "You're saying you are content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president?" he asked.
Harris responded, "It's not left-wing. Liz Cheney is not left-wing," he responded.
Kisin interjected again, "You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically elected?"
"It was a conspiracy out in the open, but it doesn't matter what part is conspiracy, what part is out in the open," Harris said.
He went on to say, "We’re gonna get four more years of Trump if we actually give this a fair hearing" of Hunter's laptop and compared the work to prevent Trump from winning again to trying to stop "an asteroid hurdling toward earth."
Harris elaborated on his comments on Twitter Thursday.
In a series of tweets, Harris said, "There is a podcast clip circulating that seems to be confusing many people about my views on Trump (which is understandable because I wasn’t speaking very clearly). So, for what it’s worth, here is what I was trying to say: I was essentially arguing for a principle of self-defense (where there’s a continuum of proportionate force that is appropriate and necessary to use). I’ve always viewed Trump as a very dangerous person to elect as president of a fake university, let alone the US, and when he became a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, I viewed him as more dangerous still. (However, I’ve never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler.)
"On the podcast, I was speaking narrowly about the wisdom and propriety of ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election. I’ve always thought that this was a very hard call, ethically and journalistically. But given what happened with the Anthony Weiner laptop in the previous election, I think it was probably the right call.
"Nothing I said on that podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or take other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency (nor do I think they did that)."
