Response to Controversy

[Originally published April 4, 2013. Version 3.0: November 2026. Sections carry the date they were last revised]

A few of the subjects I explore in my work have inspired an unusual amount of controversy. Some of this results from real differences of opinion or honest confusion, but much of it is due to the fact that certain of my detractors deliberately misrepresent my views. The purpose of this article is to address the most consequential of these distortions. I first wrote it in 2013, and last revised it in 2019, when the controversies in question were almost entirely about religion. The newer ones are about politics, and I take them up first.

A general point about the mechanics of defamation: It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the charges can be made to stick, the victim eventually seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original calumnies will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Such defamation is made all the easier if one writes and speaks on controversial topics and with a philosopher’s penchant for describing the corner cases—the ticking time bomb, the perfect weapon, the magic wand, the mind-reading machine, etc.—in search of conceptual clarity. It literally becomes child’s play to find quotations that make the author look morally suspect, even depraved.

Something else has changed since I first wrote this page. In 2013, the distortions came mostly from a few websites. Now they arrive as clips. I appear on someone else’s podcast, speaking to an audience that isn’t mine, and a two-minute excerpt gets cut by a person who loathes me, for the sole purpose of making it appear that I said something stupid or obscene. The clip is then shared by people who are too busy to listen to the original—some of them prominent, and a few of them my friends. I have watched smart people stake their reputations, and in several cases a friendship, on the premise that a clip made by someone who hates me would be accurate and self-explanatory. It generally isn’t. So where I have been clipped, I quote the clip below and then say what I meant.

Whenever I respond to unscrupulous attacks on my work, I hear from smart, supportive readers who say that I needn’t have bothered. In fact, many write to say that any response is counterproductive, because it only draws more attention to the original attack and sullies me by association. These readers think that I should be above caring about, or even noticing, treatment of this kind. Perhaps. I actually do take this line, sometimes for months or years, if for no other reason than that it allows me to get on with more interesting work. When I first wrote this page, the distortions came mostly from the left (Salon, The Guardian, Alternet, The Intercept). They now come from both directions, and in recent years the most energetic ones have come from the right. I have commented before on the general futility of responding to attacks of this kind. Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to address the most important misunderstandings of my work. (Parts of these responses have been previously published.) I encourage readers to direct people to this page whenever these issues surface online. And if you come across any charge that you think I really must answer, feel free to let me know through the contact form on this website.

A note on method: Where a full essay or podcast exists on a topic, I state my position briefly here and point to the longer treatment.

—SH

My views on Donald Trump

[Added November 2026.]

Many people who once admired my work now believe that I lost my mind over Donald Trump. I am said to suffer from a terrible case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In my view, the real Trump Derangement Syndrome is to imagine that none of what we know about this man matters.

Much has been said about Trump, some of it unfair and untrue—which is strange, because it is completely unnecessary to lie about him when enumerating his faults. The man has the attack surface of a planet. But I have never claimed that everything he does is wrong. I agreed with him about securing the border and about the threat posed by Iran, and I’ve said so. My objection has always been to his character, and to one fact above all: As a sitting president, he refused—repeatedly, for months, when asked directly—to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He then tried to overturn an election he knew he had lost, and for the first time in our history we did not have a peaceful transfer of power. I consider this the most shocking political development of my lifetime, and it should have rendered Trump politically radioactive for the rest of his life. That it didn’t tells us something about the Republican Party, which has become a cult of personality. It also says something about the precarious condition of democracy in America.

In fact, one of the most astonishing things about the 2024 presidential election, which is rarely noticed, is that half of our society was happy to promote a man to the presidency who would have refused to accept the results of that election, had he lost. Vice President Harris conceded the next day, as everyone knew she would. However, it is safe to say that almost no one who supported Trump believed he would have done what they fully expected Harris to do: which is protect the most important norm of our democracy—the very thing that makes it possible—the peaceful transfer of power. This fact alone constituted a shocking cultural injury, about which Trump’s supporters appear utterly serene.

A few things I’ve said about Trump have traveled far and wide without their context. In 2022, I said that Osama bin Laden was, in certain respects, a better person than Trump. Here is what I meant. Bin Laden was a psychologically normal human being in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview. Within that worldview he displayed real virtues—courage, self-sacrifice, a commitment to something beyond his own interests. He was a monster because of what he believed, and it was good that we killed him. Trump isn’t like this. He appears to have no commitment to anything beyond himself, including his own children; he lies as freely as he breathes; and he is, as far as I can tell, almost entirely lacking in personal virtue. The seeming paradox is that if Trump were a better person—braver, more idealistic, capable of sacrifice—he would be far more dangerous. This was a claim about character, not a reckoning of harm done.

The Hunter Biden laptop

[Added November 2026.]

In August 2022, on the podcast TRIGGERnometry, I said the following about the 2020 election and the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop:

Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared. . . . It’s Hunter Biden. It’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is, it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump was involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.

That clip has probably been viewed more times than anything else I have ever said. It has been used to establish that I endorsed a conspiracy to rig an election and that I am indifferent to the murder of children. I clarified it at length within days (Making Sense #293) and several times since. Let me do it once more, briefly.

Three questions were tangled together in that conversation. The first was whether anything on that laptop could have changed my vote. Almost certainly not. I was going to vote against a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, whatever the scope of Hunter Biden’s debauchery or his father’s corruption—and I said so in colorful statement that I’d probably use again. The second question was whether journalists were right to treat an unverified story, surfacing weeks before an election and bearing the marks of a possible foreign intelligence operation, with suspicion. I still think that was defensible. The third was whether Twitter was right to block the story. In the interview I said this was “totally warranted.” I misspoke. I meant “justifiable”—and in the very next sentence I said, for the second time in that interview, that the question was “a coin toss” for me, which makes no sense set against the word “warranted.” In retrospect, the suppression was clearly a mistake. I said so at the end of 2022 and have said so since.

Everything we have since learned about the Trump family’s self-dealing—the cryptocurrency ventures, the foreign hotel deals, the use of the presidency as a personal revenue stream—has confirmed the point I was making. If you cared about Hunter Biden’s laptop because of what it might reveal about his father, you should care far more about corruption that is far worse, happening in plain sight, every day that Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office. It is quite a simple point—about one’s moral outrage bearing some logical relationship to what one claims to be outraged about—and yet most Trump supporters can’t seem to follow it.

My response to Covid

[Added November 2026. The full account can be found in Making Sense #335, “A Postmortem on My Response to Covid.”]

There appears to be a consensus right of center that I got Covid disastrously wrong and have refused to admit it. I devoted a full episode to the question in 2023, and I’ll summarize it here.

Covid was a moving target, and there was never a moment when all the facts were in. In that situation, the most responsible thing to do was to defer to whatever consensus could be found among experts until that consensus changed—and to notice that this was a collective-action problem we could only solve together. We could only flatten the curve together. We could only achieve some measure of herd immunity together. Obviously, the question of when to trust experts, especially in an environment when public opinion has become highly politicized, is difficult to resolve. But trusting conspiracy theorists, standup comedians, and patent lunatics is rarely a valid alternative.

Several things seemed crazy to me at the time, and I said so: closing beaches, masking very young children, stigmatizing the lab-leak hypothesis as “racist,” and refusing to count natural immunity as immunity during the fight over vaccine passports. I never supported general vaccine mandates, though I defended the right of private businesses to impose them and thought mandates for medical workers made sense. And I believe, as I believed then, that the mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives and that vaccine hesitancy killed hundreds of thousands of people who did not need to die. If you think the vaccines did more harm than good and that ivermectin was an effective prophylactic, we are living on very different parts of the information landscape—and you are in the shady part.

What would I change? Two things: I said early on that the origin of the virus didn’t much matter, because we had its genome and were building vaccines against it. I was wrong about that: Evidence vanishes, and I should have done at least one podcast on the question early on. (I was never skeptical of a lab leak. I just thought the question could wait.) And I should have done more to acknowledge how differently people experienced the pandemic—the businesses lost through no fault of their owners, the schools kept closed longer than they should have been, etc.

Several clips circulate in which I appear to wish that more children had died of Covid so that I could be proven right about how dangerous it was. This would be quite insane and worth condemning, but I said nothing of the kind. This didn’t stop people—some of whom were once my friends—from sharing them anyway.

Israel, Gaza, and antisemitism

[Added November 2026. Fuller statements: Making Sense #338, “The Sin of Moral Equivalence” (October 2023); #340, “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil” (November 2023); #351, “5 Myths About Israel and the War in Gaza” (January 2024); and #373, “Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism” (July 2024).]

I have written and spoken about Israel more since October 7, 2023, than in the previous twenty years combined, and the charges against me have changed accordingly. I am now said to excuse mass civilian death, to deny a genocide, to consider Palestinians subhuman, and to refuse debate because I cannot win it. What follows is a summary of what I actually believe.

First, a change of view, which I should record myself, since certain critics present it as a discovery. I once said this on my podcast:

I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So, I don’t celebrate the idea that there’s a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. I certainly don’t support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible. . . . Though I just said that I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, the justification for such a state is rather easy to find. We need look no further than the fact that the rest of the world has shown itself eager to murder the Jews at almost every opportunity. So, if there were going to be a state organized around protecting members of a single religion, it certainly should be a Jewish state.

My opinion of religious sectarianism hasn’t improved. But I now believe that the concern in that second paragraph overwhelms almost every other consideration. Antisemitism is such a singular hatred, the Holocaust such a singular evil, and its denial such a singular insult, that defending the existence of Israel—as a place where Jews need no longer rely on the mercy of others for their survival—would be a moral necessity even if there were no other rationale for it. Before October 7th, I could have claimed to be an anti-Zionist of some sort. I am now an unapologetic Zionist, for the depressing reason that, at the end of the day, only the Jews can be counted upon to defend the Jews.

I am not interested in cataloguing all the ways Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, alters my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions. When I insist on that ethical gulf, I am making a claim about the two sides’ aims, not issuing a blanket approval of everything Israel has done or might do. Whether a war is defensive, and whether it is being fought within moral limits, are different questions. War crimes are war crimes, and they should be prosecuted. And Israel is precisely the sort of society we expect to prosecute them—unlike the societies of its enemies, which rejoice in them.

If my intransigence here mystifies you, it may help to know that I think militant Islam is much worse than you think it is. If one wanted to predict how I will judge the ethics of any future conflict, knowing whether jihadists are involved, and on which side, will suffice. When I talk about Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, I am talking about people I consider worse than Nazis—jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise. I know this sounds like dehumanizing wartime propaganda. But it isn’t. It is a description of what these people believe, and it is a description they would accept. My views on this conflict will not change unless Israel becomes as evil as her enemies: If the IDF begins using its own civilians as human shields and remains popular with those civilians; if ordinary Israelis begin celebrating martyrdom above every earthly aspiration; if the residents of Tel Aviv take Palestinian infants and old women hostage and gather in crowds baying for their blood—then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of that, there remains a world of difference between the two sides.

The bright line is human shields. There are people who will strategically force their own women and children into the line of fire so that they can inflict further violence upon their enemies, because they know their enemies have a more civilized moral code and will be reluctant to shoot back. In Gaza, Hamas launched rockets from hospitals, mosques, and schools and sheltered its fighters in hundreds of miles of tunnels while sheltering no civilians—all while Israel notified the residents of buildings it intended to bomb. Just try to imagine the Israelis using their own women and children as human shields against Hamas on the morning of October 7th. You will find that you cannot do it.

Of course, every child’s death is a tragedy, and the lives of noncombatants do not become less valuable depending on where they happen to be when a war breaks out. But the moral responsibility of the combatants depends on what they intend, what they understand, and what alternatives they have. That is why there is an enormous difference between collateral damage—a euphemism for innocent people killed or injured in war—and the intentional massacre of civilians for the purpose of maximizing horror. We cannot judge the moral balance of a war simply by counting the dead. Intentions matter.

As for the charge of “genocide,” I see nothing to debate apart from semantics. Genocide entails intent: the intent to destroy a people, in whole or in part, as such. Mass civilian casualties are not sufficient to establish it. If the Israelis wanted to eradicate the Palestinians as a people, they would not warn civilians before bombing their neighborhoods, pause operations to open humanitarian corridors, send their own sons and daughters to clear booby-trapped buildings they could level from the air, or vaccinate children they hoped to exterminate. For decades Israel has had the power to kill every Palestinian, and the Palestinian population has grown at roughly three times the global average. That is a very strange genocide. The charge is a blood libel, and it is often intended as one. The fact that the UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch endorse it does not make it true.

Many readers have urged me to debate someone—really, anyone—from the growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made Israel their professional or psychiatric obsession. I have declined for two reasons. The first is that any debate about Israel’s conduct tends to mislead, because its critics routinely lie about it, and one cannot debate a person who will not concede that Hamas is a death cult bent on genocide. The second is that relitigating the history of the region is a fool’s errand. Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of debate will reconcile them. What matters is what the people living there want now—what they will sacrifice for, what they will die for, and what they will let their children die for. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers, I believe the following remains true: If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. A real one. That was true on October 7th, and it has been true on every day since the founding of the state.

Finally, antisemitism. I lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. The response to October 7th—students at Harvard and professors at Columbia celebrating the massacre while the dead at the Nova festival were still being identified—put that assumption to rest. Why should antisemitism matter to anyone who isn’t Jewish? Because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find that they hate everything that makes open societies possible. They bring censorship, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of scapegoating along with their hatred of Jews. Decrying antisemitism is not special pleading. And if you think the current pandemic of it is really about Gaza, ask where the hatred of ethnic Russians over the war in Ukraine is. No one holds Russians in London or Toronto responsible for Putin. Holding Jews throughout the world responsible for the behavior of Israel is just antisemitism.

My views on Islam

[Written 2013; revised 2019 and November 2026.]

The fullest statement of my views on the doctrine of Islam is still found in the short book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance (Harvard University Press, 2015) and in the documentary based on that collaboration. (Maajid and I have diverged on a great deal since 2020, and I do not share many of the views he has expressed in recent years. But I stand by the book.) My views on what has happened since October 7, 2023, are in the preceding section and the essays listed there. However, there is much to say about how my earlier writing on the topic has been misunderstood.

My criticism of faith-based religion has always focused on what I consider to be bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior. Because I’m concerned about the logical and behavioral consequences of specific beliefs, I do not treat all religions the same. Not all religious doctrines are mistaken to the same degree, intellectually or ethically, and it is dishonest and ultimately dangerous to pretend otherwise. People in every tradition can be seen making the same errors, of course—e.g. relying on faith instead of evidence in matters of great personal and public concern—but the doctrines and authorities in which they place their faith run the gamut from the quaint to the psychopathic. For instance, a dogmatic commitment to nonviolence lies at the very core of Jainism, whereas an equally dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one’s faith, both from within and without, is similarly central to the doctrine of Islam. These beliefs, though held for identical reasons (faith) and in varying degrees by individual practitioners of these religions, could not be more different. And this difference has consequences in the real world. (Let that be the first barrier to entry into this conversation: If you will not concede this point, you will not understand anything I say about Islam. Unfortunately, many of my most energetic critics cannot clear this bar—and no amount of quotation from the Qur’an, the hadith, the ravings of modern Islamists, or from the plaints of their victims, makes a bit of difference.)

Facts of this kind demand that we make distinctions among faiths that many people will interpret as a sign of bigotry. For instance, I have said on more than one occasion that Mormonism is objectively less credible than Christianity, because Mormons are committed to believing nearly all the implausible things that Christians believe plus many additional implausible things. It is mathematically true to say that whatever probability one assigns to Jesus’ returning to earth to judge the living and the dead, one must assign a lesser probability to his doing so from Jackson County, Missouri. The glare of history is likewise unkind to Mormonism, for we simply know much more about Joseph Smith than we do about the twelve Apostles, and we have very good reasons to believe that he was a gifted con man. It is not a sign of bigotry against Mormons as people to honestly discuss these things. And I believe that atheists, secularists, and humanists do the world no favors by insisting that all religions be criticized in precisely the same terms and to the same degree.

Because I consider Islam to be especially inimical to the norms of civil discourse, my views are often described as “racist” by my critics. It is said that I am suffering from “Islamophobia.” Worse, I am spreading this disease to others and using a veneer of philosophical atheism and scientific skepticism to justify the oppression and murder of innocent Muslims around the world. I am a “neo-con goon,” a “war monger,” and a friend to “fascists.” In other words, I have blood on my hands.

It is hard to know where to start untangling these pernicious memes, but let’s begin with the charge of racism. My criticism of the logical and behavioral consequences of certain ideas (e.g. martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, honor, apostasy, idolatry, etc.) impugns white converts to Islam—like Adam Gadahn—every bit as much as it does Arabs like Ayman al-Zawahiri. If anything, I tend to be more critical of converts, whatever the color of their skin, because they were not brainwashed into the faith from birth. I am also in the habit of making invidious comparisons between Islam and other religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Must I point out that most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are not white like me? One would hope there is no such need—but the work of several prominent writers suggests that the need is pressing.

It is on the topic of Islam that my critics have truly mastered the art of selective quotation. Here is how the trick is done: Murtaza Hussain writes an abysmally dishonest article on the Al Jazeera website accusing me of a genocidal hatred of Muslims. I am, we are told, a bloodthirsty racist—and my words prove it. Consider:

Harris has stated that the correct policy with regard to Western Muslim populations is in fact that which is currently being pursued by contemporary fascist movements today. In Harris’ view: ‘The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.’

The author then helpfully links to an article about European fascists—in this case members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party in Greece—who have threatened to turn immigrants into soap and lampshades. How, the shocked reader is left to wonder, could I admire such people?

But here are my words in their original context:

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game. While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t. The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

The whole purpose of that essay (written in 2006) was to express my fear that the political correctness of the Left has made it taboo to even notice the problem of political Islam, leaving only right-wing fanatics to do the job. Such fanatics are, as I thought I made clear, the wrong people to do this, being nearly as bad as jihadists themselves. I was not praising fascists: I was arguing that liberal confusion and cowardice was empowering them.

Perhaps the point is still not clear (can one ever be sure?). So, imagine: A copy of the Qur’an gets burned tomorrow—or is merely rumored to have been burned. What will happen if this act of desecration is widely publicized? Well, we can be sure that Muslims by the thousands, or even the tens of thousands, will riot—perhaps in a dozen countries. Scores of people may die as a result. Who can be counted upon to defend free speech in the face of this pious madness? Will the editorial page of The New York Times remind the world that free people should be free to burn the Qu’ran, or any other book, without fear of being murdered? Almost certainly not. But the secular Left will surely denounce the bigot who burned the book for his “religious insensitivity” and hold him largely (if not entirely) responsible for the resulting mayhem and loss of life. It will be left to crackpot pastors, white supremacists, and other jingoists on the far Right—and, of course, “Islamophobes” like me—to remind us that the First Amendment exists, that books don’t feel pain, and that the sensitivities of every other faith are regularly traduced without similar reprisals.

Have I made the job of distorting my views easier than it needed to be? Undoubtedly. And in this particular case, a careful reader was kind enough to take the author’s feet out of my mouth on many other points. The problem, however, is that some critics have no scruples. When I called Glenn Greenwald’s attention to how he had misrepresented me by publicly endorsing Hussain’s article, he wrote a nearly identical article of his own on The Guardian website. Multiply this kind of malicious treatment a thousandfold, and you will understand why many writers, scientists, and public intellectuals who agree with me about Islam and about the failure of the Left have decided that it is simply too much trouble to make the case in public. The term “Islamophobia” is now being used to shield intrinsically harmful ideas from criticism.

Most religions produce a fair amount of needless suffering. Consider the pedophile-priest scandal in the Catholic Church, which is something I’ve written about before, I hope with sufficient outrage. One can certainly argue, as I have, that Catholic teaching is partly to blame for these crimes against children. By making contraception and abortion taboo, the Church ensured that there would be many out-of-wedlock births among the faithful; by stigmatizing unwed mothers, it further guaranteed that many children would be abandoned to Church-run orphanages where they could be preyed upon by sexually unhealthy men lurking in the barrow of priestly celibacy. I don’t think any of this was consciously planned—it’s just a grotesque consequence of some very stupid doctrines. And yet the truth is that no direct link exists between Christian scripture and child rape. However, just imagine if the New Testament contained passages promising heaven to any priest who sodomized a child. And then imagine that more or less every journalist and politician denied that the resultant crimes against children had anything whatsoever to do with the “true” teachings of Christianity. That is the uncanny situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam.

As I wrote in my personal exchange with Greenwald, “Islamophobia” is a term of propaganda. Here is how he responded to me on the Guardian website:

Perhaps the most repellent claim Harris made to me was that Islamophobia is fictitious and non-existent, “a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia”. How anyone can observe post-9/11 political discourse in the west and believe this is truly mystifying. The meaning of “Islamophobia” is every bit as clear as “anti-semitism” or “racism” or “sexism” and all sorts of familiar, related concepts. It signifies (1) irrational condemnations of all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group; (2) a disproportionate fixation on that group for sins committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially one’s own; and/or (3) sweeping claims about the members of that group unjustified by their actual individual acts and beliefs.

This is extremely useful, being both clearly stated and clearly wrong. The meaning of “Islamophobia” is not at all like the meanings of those other terms. Whatever the origins of the word, it functions to blur the line between criticizing specific doctrines within Islam and hating people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or some other indelible characteristic—and to make arguing for secularism, for freedom of thought, or even for the basic rights of women and girls in the face of Islamic theocracy, seem like a form of bigotry. Of course, xenophobic bias against immigrants from Muslim-majority countries exists—Arabs, Pakistanis, Somalis, etc.—and it is odious. And so-called “white supremacy” (white racism and tribalism) is an old and resurgent menace. But inventing a new term does not give us license to say that there is a new form of hatred in the world.

There is no race of Muslims. They aren’t united by any physical traits or a diaspora. Unlike Judaism, Islam is a vast, missionary faith that aggressively seeks new adherents, of any origin. The only way that Muslims can be said to exist as a group, therefore, is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam. And the only thing that could make members of this group the possible target of anyone’s “irrational” fear, “disproportionate” focus, or “unjustified” criticism are the beliefs and behaviors that unite them.

Two distinctions do most of the work here. The first is between people and ideas: We can despise communism, having observed its effects on every society that has tried it, without hating communists as people. The second is between an identity a person acquires by accepting certain ideas and one conferred by the circumstances of birth. If you tell me a person is Japanese, I know something about his great-grandparents. If you tell me he is a communist, or an astrologer, you are telling me about his mental life—about beliefs he can, at least in principle, be reasoned out of. Criticizing Islam as a system of ideas, and noticing the terrible effects that some of these ideas have on our world, is no more a form of bigotry than criticizing communism is.

How does the term “anti-Semitism” differ? Well, we have a 2000-year-old tradition of religiously inspired hatred against Jews, conceived as a distinct race of people, both by those who hate them and by Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism is a specific form of racism—which is now especially prevalent among Muslims, for reasons that can be traced, not merely to recent conflicts over land in the Middle East, but to the doctrine of Islam. “Sexism,” when applied to men, names a bias against women—not because of any doctrines they might espouse, but because they were born without a Y chromosome. The meanings of these terms are quite clear, and each names an animus directed at people, as people, not because of their beliefs or behavior, but because of the mere circumstances of their birth.

Unlike a person’s race or sex, beliefs can be argued for, tested, criticized, and changed. In fact, wherever the norms of rational conversation are allowed to do their work, a person’s beliefs must earn respect. There is a good reason for this: beliefs are claims about reality and about how human beings should live within it—so they necessarily lead to behaviors, values, laws, and institutions that affect the lives of all people, whether they share these beliefs or not. Beliefs end marriages and start wars.

So “Islamophobia” must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it. Thus the relevant question to ask is whether a special concern about people who are deeply committed to the fundamental doctrines of Islam, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, is irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified.

Contrary to Greenwald’s assertion, my condemnation of Islam does not apply to “all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group.” My condemnation applies to the doctrines themselves and to the ways in which they reliably produce these “bad acts.” Unfortunately, in the case of Islam, the bad acts of the worst individuals—the jihadists, the murderers of apostates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like livestock—are the clearest and most easily justified examples of the doctrine in practice. Those who adhere most strictly to the actual teachings of Islam, those who expound its timeless dogma most honestly, are precisely the people whom Greenwald and other obscurantists want us to believe least represent the faith.

This is a very easy difference of opinion to resolve: One need only study the doctrine of Islam—not merely as it existed in the 7th century, but as it exists today—and ask some very basic questions. What, for instance, is the penalty for apostasy? It isn’t spelled out clearly in the Qur’an—though verses 2:217 and 4:89 suggest that those who seek to lead others away from the faith must be killed. However, the general sanction is made clear in the hadith, and in the opinions of Muslim jurists and Muslim mobs everywhere. The year is 2026, and the penalty for apostasy, everywhere under Islam, is death (though some jurists would require that the apostate also speak out against the faith). And I receive emails from former Muslims who are all too aware of what it means to be a former Muslim. Depending on where they live, these people run a real risk of being murdered, perhaps even by members of their own families, for having lost their faith.

Is it really true that the sins for which I hold Islam accountable are “committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially [my] own”? What Greenwald surely means to convey is that the U.S. government is (in some sense that is not merely absurd) the worst terrorist organization on earth. I have argued against this general idea in many places, especially in my first book, The End of Faith, and I won’t repeat that argument here. I will say, however, that nothing about honestly discussing the doctrine of Islam requires that a person ignore all that might be wrong with U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, the vestiges of empire, or anything else that may be contributing to our ongoing conflicts in the Muslim world. Which is to say that even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge impediments to human freedom (and these impediments are quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals routinely bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West.

Western conflict with the Muslim world has arisen, off and on, for centuries. Thomas Jefferson sued for peace with the Barbary Pirates who had enslaved something like 1.5 million Europeans and Americans between 16th and 18th centuries. As Christopher Hitchens once pointed out, the explicit justification for this piracy was the doctrine of Islam. In fact, this collision with Islam helped ensure the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, for it was argued that only a federation of states with a strong navy could stand against such a persistent threat. Consequently, one could argue that the American war on terror formally began in 1801 with the Barbary Wars—waged by the Jefferson and Madison administrations. This is one of the many ways to see that our troubles in the Muslim world are not purely a matter of our lust for oil, our support for dictators, or any aspect of U.S. foreign policy. As the much-maligned Samuel Huntington one said, “Islam has bloody borders.” It always has. But many people seem determined to deny this.

Is it true, as Greenwald insists, that the religiously inspired affronts to reason and civility that I criticize among Muslims are “committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups”?

Let’s take a trip to the real world. Consider: Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, write a novel, or stage a Broadway play that denigrates Mormonism is free to do it. In the United States, this freedom is ostensibly guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. When The Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical of the year, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for the faith in Playbill. A wasted effort, perhaps: but this was a genuinely charming sign of good humor, given the alternatives. What are the alternatives? Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else? No, you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of this play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. Yes, there are crazy people in every faith—and I often hear from them. But what is true of Mormonism is true of every other faith, with a single exception. At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam—and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of “Islamophobia,” Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame.

It is depressing to quote from one’s own work, but it is even more depressing to struggle to find new ways to say something that shouldn’t have needed saying in the first place. Here is how I put it in the immediate aftermath of the Innocence of Muslims debacle, in an article entitled “On the Freedom to Offend an Imaginary God”:

Consider what is actually happening: Some percentage of the world’s Muslims—Five percent? Fifteen? Fifty? It’s not yet clear—are demanding that all non-Muslims conform to the strictures of Islamic law. And where they do not immediately resort to violence in their protests, they threaten it. Carrying a sign that reads “Behead Those Who Insult the Prophet” may still count as an example of peaceful protest, but it is also an assurance that infidel blood would be shed if the imbecile holding the placard only had more power. This grotesque promise is, of course, fulfilled in nearly every Muslim society. To make a film like Innocence of Muslims anywhere in the Middle East would be as sure a method of suicide as the laws of physics allow. What exactly was in the film? Who made it? What were their motives? Was Muhammad really depicted? Was that a Qur’an burning, or some other book? Questions of this kind are obscene. Here is where the line must be drawn and defended without apology: We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it. At moments like this, we inevitably hear—from people who don’t know what it’s like to believe in paradise—that religion is just a way of channeling popular unrest. The true source of the problem can be found in the history of Western aggression in the region. It is our policies, rather than our freedoms, that they hate. I believe that the future of liberalism—and much else—depends on our overcoming this ruinous self-deception. Religion only works as a pretext for political violence because many millions of people actually believe what they say they believe: that imaginary crimes like blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses.

I stand by these words. It is, in fact, possible to win this argument decisively. Unfortunately, no one on the regressive Left ever seems to notice.

For several years now, whenever I have drawn a link between Islam and violence—especially the tactic of suicide bombing—my critics have urged me to consult the work of Robert A. Pape. Pape is the author of a very influential paper, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” ( American Political Science Review 97, no. 3, 2003), and a subsequent book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, in which he argues that suicidal terrorism is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology.

To be clear, I have never argued (and would never argue) that all conflicts are attributable to religion or that all suicide bombing is the product of Islam. I am well aware, for instance, that the Tamil Tigers were avowedly secular. Even in this case, however, it seems only decent to recall that they learned the tactic of suicide bombing from Hezbollah and eventually developed their own quasi-religious cult of martyr worship. One can’t really argue that they were a group of rational actors. And even here, in this most secular of cases, always used to exculpate Islam, we find the divisive role of religion—because it seems unreasonable to believe that a civil war would have erupted in Sri Lanka if the Tamils, who are nominal Hindus, had been Sinhalese Buddhists, like the government they were fighting. (Again, nothing turns on this point, because I admit that not all terrorism need be religiously inspired.)

The general blindness of secular academics to the religious roots of Muslim violence is easily explained. As my friend Jerry Coyne once observed, when confronted with a transparently religious motive (e.g. “I will blow myself up to get into paradise”), secular scholars refuse to take it at face value; they always look for the “deeper” reasons—economic, political, or personal—behind it. However, when given economic, political, or personal motives (e.g. “I did it because they stole my family’s land, and I felt totally hopeless.”), these researchers always seem to take a person at his word. They never dig for the religious motive behind apparently terrestrial concerns. The game is rigged. This is how an anthropologist like Scott Atran can interview dozens of jihadists—each of whom rattles on about God and paradise—and come out thinking that the doctrine of Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.

To describe the principal aims of a group like al Qaeda as “nationalistic,” as Pape does, is simply ludicrous. Al Qaeda’s goal is the establishment of a global caliphate. And even in those cases where a jihadist like Osama bin Laden seemed to voice concern about the fate of a nation, his grievances with its “occupiers” were primarily theological. Osama bin Laden objected to the presence of infidels in proximity to the holy sites on the Arabian Peninsula. And we were not “occupiers” of Saudi Arabia, in any case. We were there by the permission of the Saudi regime—a regime that bin Laden considered insufficiently Islamic. To say that members of al Qaeda have perpetrated terrorist atrocities against U.S. interests and innocent Muslims because of a “nationalistic” agenda is to just play a game with words.

Pape’s narrow focus on suicide terrorism also allows him to ignore all the other barbarism in the Muslim world that has its origins in religion. Was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie the result of foreign occupation? The Danish cartoon controversy? The calls for blood over a poorly named teddy bear? The movement to hang atheist bloggers in Bangladesh? What about the internecine murders of apostates in Pakistan (accomplished, all too often, by suicide bombers)? The ubiquitous abuse of women? Are these problems also the result of western occupation? How do the perpetrators of these crimes explain their own behavior? It is always by reference to their most sacred concern: Islam.

Many peoples have been conquered by foreign powers or otherwise mistreated and show no propensity for the type of violence that is commonplace under Islam. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation every bit as oppressive as any ever imposed on a Muslim country. At least one million Tibetans have died as a result, and their culture has been systematically eradicated. Even their language has been taken from them. In recent years, they have begun to practice self-immolation in protest. The difference between self-immolation and blowing oneself up in a crowd of children, or at the entrance to a hospital, is impossible to overstate, and reveals the great difference in moral attitude between Vajrayana Buddhism and Islam. This is not to say that Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers couldn’t exist. Tibetans, generally speaking, are not pacifists—nor are most Buddhists elsewhere. In fact, during WWII, the Japanese Kamikaze pilots were influenced by the doctrine of Zen Buddhism. But there are important differences between Zen and Vajrayana that seem relevant here. Vajrayana emphasizes compassion in a way that Zen does not, and Zen generally maintains a more martial and more paradoxical view of ethics.

My point, of course, is that beliefs matter. And it is not an accident that so many Muslims believe that jihad and martyrdom are the highest callings in human life, while many Tibetans believe that compassion and self-transcendence are. This is what Islam and Vajrayana Buddhism, respectively, teach.

(No doubt, many readers will wonder what I think about the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by Theravadan Buddhists. It is yet another, example of religious tribalism leading to misery and murder. However, the situation would be immeasurably worse if such tribal violence could be easily justified by the contents of the Pali Canon. Imagine if the Buddha had once preached a sermon promising nibbana to anyone lucky enough to die in the act of killing Muslims…. Would that help or hurt?)

Am I saying that Islam is the worst religion across the board? No. Again, one must always focus on the specific consequences of specific ideas. There is, for instance, no reason to mention Islam when criticizing religious opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, because the doctrine allows for it. This is not owing to some biological or ethical insight on the part of Muhammad, obviously. It is simply a happy accident that at least one hadith suggests that the human soul enters the embryo many weeks after conception (either at day 40, 80, or 120, depending on how one interprets it). So it would be preposterous and unfair to equate Islam with Christianity when discussing religious impediments to this form of research.

It is often alleged that I paint Islam with too broad a brush, ignoring a truly moderate mainstream. This is untrue. Yes, there are more moderate strands of the faith: The Ahmadis, for instance, resemble what many liberal Westerners imagine the “true” face of Islam must be like. I still find their creed disconcerting: According to one of the websites affiliated with this movement, Ahmadis believe that the “Holy Qu’ran is the word of God which is to guide mankind forever, and the Holy Prophet Muhammad was the perfect model of Islamic teachings whose example shall forever be binding on every Muslim to follow.” To my ear, the words “forever” and “perfect” and “every” and “binding” convey the scent of despotism about as well as “a thousand-year Reich”—especially when one considers the actual contents of the Qur’an and the example set by Muhammad. However, the Ahmadis at least claim to believe that jihad “primarily signifies a spiritual, intellectual and moral struggle to reform oneself and others” and to condemn “all use of force except in unavoidable self-defense.” I’m not sure I would want to put these assertions to the test by venturing into an Ahmadi mosque with a fresh batch of cartoons of the Prophet, but the Ahmadis are at least disposed to make the sorts of conciliatory sounds that the religious must make in order to live peacefully in a world where most people do not share their beliefs.

But the Ahmadis are by no means the “true” face of Islam, and their mosques are regularly bombed in Pakistan. It is only decent to observe that these atrocities have nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, or U.S. foreign policy, or any other rational concern. Why do Ahmadis suffer and die in this way? The reason is as easily discerned as reasons generally are among religious lunatics: Sunni Muslims consider Ahmadis to be heretics—in fact, the government of Pakistan officially deems them so. Unwisely, one branch of this sect holds that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), was a true Prophet of Islam, akin to Muhammad. One thing is as certain in the year 2026 as it was in the year 1026: If you claim that your favorite mystic was Muhammad’s true successor, some Muslims will be eager to lay down their lives for the pleasure of destroying yours.

Finally, as I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Leftists like Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of “Islamophobia,” display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, gays, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. It is, as yet, unclear how to address this problem. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global conception of human rights, seems a very unlikely path to a solution.

For further discussion of the “Islamophobia” canard, see my exchange with Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Lifting the Veil of “Islamophobia”, and the podcast and essay “What Is ‘Islamophobia’?” (December 2023).

My Views on Muslim Immigration

[Written 2017; revised 2019 and November 2026.]

When President Trump introduced an executive order suspending immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries (the so-called “Muslim ban”), I stated unequivocally that I did not support it. As I wrote at the time:

It is perfectly possible—and increasingly necessary—to speak about the ideological roots of Islamism and jihadism, and even about the unique need for reform within mainstream Islam itself, without lapsing into bigotry or disregarding the suffering of refugees. Indeed, when one understands the problem for what it is, one realizes that secular Muslims, liberal Muslims, and former Muslims are among the most desirable allies to have in the West—and, indeed, such people are the primary victims of Islamist intolerance and jihadist terror in Muslim-majority countries.

And this is my view of Muslim immigration in general. Any policy that would keep ex-Muslims (such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Muhhamad) or liberal, secular Muslims (such as Maajid Nawaz and Deeyah Khan) out of a free society, is idiotic and unethical. However, it is also clear that the European Union’s mismanagement of Muslim immigration has begun to resemble a slow suicide—due to the widespread failure of Muslims to integrate and the rise of right-wing populism in response.

Open societies cannot tolerate the spread of Islamic extremism indefinitely. This is what Karl Popper described as the “paradox of tolerance”—the tolerance of open societies can be used by the intolerant to destroy them from within—and it is precisely what Islamists are attempting throughout the West. The problem is worst in Europe. The United Arab Emirates recently announced that it will no longer pay for its students to study in the UK, for fear that they will be radicalized by their fellow Muslims at Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. (They appear to be suffering some Islamophobia over there in the UAE.) The failure to integrate Muslim immigrants, and the refusal to speak honestly about why, is also empowering the European far right.

There is, however, a statement I made (back in 2006) about Muslims in France that I would want to retract, if that were possible. I wrote on Truthdig:

Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe. The demographic trends are ominous: Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the original blog post wasn’t footnoted, and I cannot recall the source of this demographic projection. I know one thing to a moral certainty, however: I did not make it up.

A weaker (though similar) assertion can be found 2 years earlier in the Telegraph:

Given current birth rates, it is not impossible that in 25 years France will have a Muslim majority.

Whatever the source of my original claim, it no longer seems likely to be true. While immigration rose to levels that few anticipated in the wake of the Syrian civil war, birthrates have fallen precipitously. An article from that period (Ross Douthat, in the Atlantic) claimed that “Europe’s Muslims are considerably younger than its non-Muslims, and their overall birth rate is roughly three times as high.” And Pew (2005) struck a similar note:

Islam is already the fastest-growing religion in Europe. Driven by immigration and high birthrates, the number of Muslims on the continent has tripled in the last 30 years. Most demographers forecast a similar or even higher rate of growth in the coming decades.

The disparity in birthrates has since narrowed. According to Pew (2017) “the average Muslim woman in Europe is expected to have 2.6 children, a full child more than the average non-Muslim woman (1.6 children).”

So, whatever was true in 2006, the demographic landscape appears to have changed. It should come as no surprise, I suppose, that several of my critics have sought to paint my unreferenced projection as a conscious lie, designed to stoke anti-Muslim bigotry and paranoia. The truth, however, is much less sinister: I’m not a demographer, and the projection didn’t originate with me. My real error was in not citing my source at the time.

Free speech, social media, and Elon Musk

[Added November 2026. See Making Sense #304, “Why I Left Twitter,” and #307, “Twitter, Elon, & Free Speech.”]

Many people believe that I used to support free speech unconditionally—when I was defending cartoonists against Islamist censors and their dupes on the left—and that I abandoned the principle once the censors came for Donald Trump. This gets the principle wrong.

Every open society regulates speech to some degree, and most are far more restrictive than America is. Liberal democracies like Germany, Denmark, England, Canada, and New Zealand prohibit so-called “hate speech” and other forms of expression they consider socially toxic. I think these efforts are almost always misguided. And what has been happening in England of late seems patently insane: people have been arrested, and some put in prison, for things they posted on social media. So, I think we are very lucky to have the First Amendment in the United States.

But the First Amendment simply ensures that, with a few narrow exceptions, a person can’t be jailed or otherwise abused by the government for thinking out loud. It offers no guidance to publishers or platforms about which ideas they should actively spread. And contrary to what many imagine, there are no “free speech absolutists” doing business anywhere. Even 4chan, that infamous cesspool of obscenity and falsehood, has a moderation policy.

In America, many people believe that publishers and platforms have a duty to promote all speech permitted by the First Amendment—and that any policy more restrictive than this constitutes “censorship” or “cancellation.” But this gets things exactly backward. Editorial decisions express the First Amendment rights of the people who make them. My decision not to have RFK Jr. on my podcast, because he is a liar and a loon, is as much an expression of my freedom of speech as my disparaging him now is.

When Twitter kicked Alex Jones off the platform, because of all the harm he was causing, that was an editorial decision. The people who made it were free to choose to no longer associate with a madman. And when Elon Musk brought Jones back on the platform, with great fanfare, along with countless other maniacs, so that he could pretend to be a free-speech absolutist—all while suspending the accounts of normal journalists and complying with the demands of authoritarian regimes to suppress the speech of political dissidents—those were editorial decisions too. The problem isn’t just that platforms like X fail as gatekeepers and actively publish the thoughts of racists, conspiracists, and malicious imbeciles. The worst part is that they have designed algorithms that preferentially amplify this content. And they take no responsibility for the damage this is causing to society.

For instance, over on the far right, the obsession with Jews is linked to a hatred of immigration and to the idea that a hidden, transnational elite is seeking to flood the West with nonwhite multitudes. This conspiracy theory goes by the name of the “Great Replacement,” a term popularized in France but which one hears in English everywhere from the mouths of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” to Musk’s own enthusiastic retweets of the racists he just happens to follow on X. Of course, there is no evidence that Jews, as a group, are pursuing open borders to dilute Western populations. What exists are ordinary political disagreements about immigration policy, and a tendency, among some Jewish organizations, to support refugees and humane immigration reform—often grounded in the memory that many nations, America among them, turned away Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, leading to their extermination. Conspiracy thinking transforms this moral tradition into a sinister plot, perhaps because the truth is boring: Mass migration is driven by war, inequality, geography, labor demand, and policy failure—not by a cabal of Jews working behind the scenes to destroy the very societies in which they themselves hope to thrive. Musk might ask himself, “How many more Islamists and jihadists do the Jews of London or Sydney want for neighbors?” Whether he can draw the obvious conclusion or not, he should be held responsible for the dangerous lies that now spread, every minute of the day, on the social media platform that he owns.

This is not a question of any one person’s right to free speech being protected or curtailed. Individuals, including Musk, should be free to say what they want. Here, we are talking about companies that algorithmically determine what billions of people see next, with the goal of maximizing user engagement, without any regard for the consequences. The protection afforded to all platforms under Section 230, allowing them to enjoy the advantages of being publishers without shouldering any of the burdens, has been a disaster. It’s time we held these companies responsible for the harms they cause individuals and institutions by preferentially spreading lies and misinformation. Granted, it may be technically difficult to achieve this. But everyone can see that the business model of these platforms is detestable—and distinct from any individual user’s freedom of speech. In many cases, we are now talking about the behavior of bots, not people—and bots don’t have free-speech rights to protect. Unfortunately, the differentiation between people and bots is one that these platforms have decided not to make, because it hasn’t served their financial interests to do so.

I deleted my own Twitter account on Thanksgiving 2022, after twelve years and some nine thousand tweets. Many assumed this was a protest against Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. It wasn’t. I left because the platform was making me a worse person. It was showing me the worst of other people in a way that was distorting my view of humanity—causing me to dislike people I had never met, and even people I knew. I believe very few of my enemies on Twitter are anywhere near as bad as they seemed to me there. I also left, in part, because of what I watched it do to Musk.

Identity politics and “wokeness”

[Added November 2026.]

Identity politics is the practice of treating a person’s membership in a group as foundational, imagining that it should determine his interests, allegiances, and standing to speak on a wide variety of important issues. Unfortunately, the groups in question are defined by traits that are generally unchosen and often unchangeable: race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation. The resulting shattering of our politics has nothing to do with ideas, about which people of all sorts can be persuaded. Instead, an obsession with identity produces a politics of pure emotion, on both the left and the right. And the path from a politics of emotion to fanaticism is very short.

A clannish approach to politics is bound to become unethical, because ethics, by definition, must be universal. Something can’t be right or wrong simply because you happen to be who you are. (That’s not ethics; that’s psychopathy.) Identifying people who have suffered some injustice is fine, of course, but it is different from making group membership the basis of one’s concern or the measure of a person’s moral worth. And opposition to discrimination, however defined, must still rest on universal principles. In America, our long experiment with “affirmative action” has revealed what should have been obvious from the beginning: Fair treatment cannot depend on which group a person belongs to, because this requires that we treat individuals unfairly.

I called the wokeness of the last decade a moral panic because that is what it was: a movement built, in part, on misinformation about police violence (see below), enforced through the destruction of reputations, and capable of capturing institutions—universities, newsrooms, medical associations—that should have known better.

On gender identity, my views are easily clipped, so here they are in one place. I am convinced that gender dysphoria is real, and that in some cases medical transition is the most compassionate and rational thing a person can do. And of course there should be political equality for people with gender dysphoria. But when a popular lecturer at Harvard is hounded out of her job for merely stating that there are two biological sexes—male and female, defined by their gametes—something has gone terribly wrong in our culture. [See the case of Carole Hooven: J. Suk Gersen, “The Future of Academic Freedom,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2024; Hooven, C. (2024, January 16). “Carole Hooven: Why I left Harvard.” The Free Press.]

As is often the case, words have misled us—because transgenderism isn’t a single, coherent phenomenon. Biological females who identify as men don’t present the same public challenges as biological males who identify as women, and the evidence for social contagion is much stronger among the former group than among the latter. Virtually all the controversy about sports, single-sex spaces, and violence involves trans women (biological males) infringing on the rights of women, not trans men (biological females) outcompeting, injuring, or otherwise threatening the safety of men. Trans women are people, of course, and should have all the political freedoms of people. But to insist that they are women—and that making any distinction based on biological sex, for any purpose, is an act of bigotry—is the precept of a new religion. And it is a religion that most Americans want nothing to do with. While I might not want to defend everything J.K. Rowling has said in her various skirmishes on social media, having a mob of activists and hysterics suddenly proscribe the use of the term “woman”—demanding instead that we speak of “birthing person,” “menstruators,” “people with ovaries,” or some other absurd construction—was always insufferable. The fact that so many institutions bent the knee to this idiocy—including our most prestigious scientific journals—is simply mortifying.

We had an epidemic of teenage girls claiming to want double mastectomies, with hundreds receiving them each year, spawned, at least in part, by their cultic indoctrination on TikTok, and any parent who resisted this trend was demonized, and some even lost custody of their kids. Congratulations, Democrats. Somewhere around 2016 you found the most politically toxic thing in the galaxy and hung it around your necks.

There are probably many reasons why Kamala Harris isn’t president of the United States at this moment, but her inability to disavow her prior support for taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgery for incarcerated illegal immigrants is certainly one of them. That was the political equivalent of a Saturday Night Live sketch wrapped in an Onion article.

On former friends and allies

[Added November 2026.]

In recent years, I’ve watched several friends who I once believed to be good, or at least good enough, become ethically grotesque. This has been disconcerting, for many reasons. I’m at a stage in life when one imagines that one better understands, and accepts, human frailty. It is, therefore, startling to realize that the list of people with whom I can no longer safely share a dinner table is growing, rather than shrinking.

It would be tempting to simply ignore these developments, if it weren’t for the fact that some of these people have large public profiles and are actively poisoning our culture with lies. Many joined the cult that surrounds Donald Trump; some have made careers out of spreading conspiracy theories; one bought Twitter. I have criticized them publicly, in certain cases long after the criticism was warranted.

The conflicting responsibilities here, between loyalty to a friend and to one’s audience, have been hard to navigate, and I am not sure I understand the ethics of even now. What do I owe a friend whose brain has gone haywire in public? For a long time, I privileged the personal and private over the public and professional—and then certain lines were crossed, and I could no longer keep silent. The truth is, I’m still struggling to draw a lesson from this experience. I’m reluctant to believe that I should be slower to see the good in people and to wish them well. And I can’t simply decide to be a better judge of character than I am. Consequently, I have little confidence that I will be able to avoid embarrassments like this in the future.

On a “return to Christianity”

[Added November 2026. See Making Sense #442.]

It is now said that the “New Atheists” have been refuted by events. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray have converted to Christianity. For years, Jordan Peterson filled arenas preaching a faith he declined to specify. And a growing number of smart people argue that the West needs Christianity—as a bulwark against Islam on one side, and against a secular wasteland of porn, pills, and social media on the other.

Suppose it were true that a society needs good Christian soldiers to resist Islamic theocracy. This would still give us no reason to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, rose from the dead, or will return to Earth at the end of history. Political necessity is not evidence of God. As always, religious people are standing proudly on a mountain of non-sequiturs—which they recognize immediately when in the presence of a rival faith. The reasons a Christian is unmoved by a Muslim’s defense of Islam are the reasons I am unmoved by both.

People want meaning, community, and a sense of the sacred, and they have noticed that the secular world has done a poor job of supplying them. But everything of value that religion offers—including the most profound experiences of self-transcendence—is available without believing anything on insufficient evidence. That, at any rate, is the argument I make in Waking Up.

My position on profiling for the purpose of airline security

[Written 2012. As of 2026, I have nothing to add, and nothing to retract.]

I once wrote a short essay about airline security that provoked a ferocious backlash from readers. In publishing this piece, I’m afraid that I broke one of my cardinal rules of time (and sanity) management: Not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself. I learned this the hard way once before, in discussing the ethics of torture and collateral damage (see below), but this time the backlash was even more unpleasant and less rational.

One line in my article raised a tsunami of contempt for me in liberal and secular circles:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

Of course, many of my detractors have used this quotation in ways calculated to make readers believe that I want dark-skinned people singled out—and not just in our airports, but everywhere. What my critics always neglect to say, however, is that in the article in which that sentence appears, I explicitly include white, middle-aged men like me in the profile (twice). This still leaves many millions of travelers outside the profile. My point is that we should be giving less scrutiny to people who obviously aren’t jihadists. Whatever the practical constraints are on implementing such a policy, I remain willing to bet my life that the woman in the photo below is not a suicide bomber. Which is, of course, to say that the TSA employee who appears to be searching her body for explosives is not only inconveniencing the woman herself, along with everyone in line behind her, but putting people’s lives in jeopardy.

To assert that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances offer no indication of a person’s beliefs or terrorist potential is either quite crazy or utterly dishonest. We are paying a very high price for this obscurantism—and the price could grow much higher in an instant. We have limited resources, and every moment spent searching a woman like the one pictured above, or the children seen in the videos I linked to in my original article, is a moment in which someone or something else goes unobserved. Suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon. It follows that applying equal scrutiny to Mennonites is a dangerous waste of time.

In the hope of achieving some clarity on the issue of profiling, I let the anti-profiling security expert Bruce Schneier write a guest post on my blog. I then engaged in a long and rather tedious debate with him. It seems that few minds were changed, including my own. I heard from many readers who took my side in the debate—among them some who have worked in airport security, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Delta Force, fraud detection, and other areas where real-time threat assessments must be made. I also received unequivocal support from Saudis, Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians, and others who are regularly profiled. However, I heard as well from many people who thought that Schneier mopped the floor with me. Some of these readers continue to wonder why I, being ostensibly committed to reason, haven’t publicly conceded defeat and changed my view.

There seems to be a consensus, even among my critics, that no one does airline security better than the Israelis (Schneier himself admits this). But, as I pointed out, and Schneier agreed, the Israelis profile in every sense of the term—racially, ethnically, behaviorally, by nationality and religion, etc. In the end, Schneier’s argument came down to a claim about limited resources: He argued that we are too poor (and, perhaps, too stupid) to effectively copy the Israeli approach. That may be true. But pleading poverty and incompetence is very different from proving that profiling doesn’t work, or that it is unethical, or that the link between the tenets of Islam and jihadist violence isn’t causal.

Schneier’s opposition to profiling had almost nothing to do with the reasons that many people find it controversial. But none of my critics seemed to notice this. Nor did they notice when Schneier conceded that the most secure system would use a combination of profiling and randomness. He simply argued that profiling for the purpose of airline security is too expensive and impractical. But I was not vilified because I advocated something expensive and impractical. I was vilified because my critics believe that I support a policy that is shockingly unethical, well known to be ineffective, and born of confusion about the causes of terrorism.

My position on profiling is very simple: We should admit that we know what we are looking for (suicidal terrorists) and that certain people obviously require less scrutiny than others. We should scan everyone’s luggage, of course, because bombs can be placed there without a person’s knowledge. But given scarce resources, we can’t afford to waste our time and attention pretending to think that every traveler is equally likely to be a member of al Qaeda.

My position on preemptive nuclear war

[Written 2013; revised November 2026.]

The journalist Chris Hedges has repeatedly claimed (in print, in public lectures, on the radio, and on television) that I advocate a nuclear first-strike against the Muslim world. His remarks, which have been recycled continually in interviews and blog posts, generally take the following form:

I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world.

(I don’t believe in atheists, Salon, March 13, 2008)

Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith calls for us to consider a nuclear first-strike on the Arab world. I almost fell out of my chair reading that.

(Q&A at Harvard Divinity School, March 20, 2008)

Harris, echoing the blood lust of Hitchens, calls, in his book The End of Faith, for a nuclear first strike against the Islamic world.

(The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, Alternet, March 22, 2008)

And you have in Sam Harris’ book, “The End of Faith,” a call for us to consider a nuclear first strike against the Arab world. This isn’t rational. This is insane.

(The Tavis Smiley Show, April 15, 2008)

Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, asks us to consider carrying out a nuclear first-strike on the Arab world. That’s not a rational option—that’s insanity.

(A Conversation with Chris Hedges, Free Inquiry, August/September 2008)

Wherever they appear, Hedges’s comments leave the impression that I want the U.S. government to start killing Muslims by the tens of millions. Below I present the only passage I have ever written on the subject of preventive nuclear war and the only passage that Hedges could be referring to in my work (The End of Faith, pp. 128-129). I have taken the liberty of emphasizing some of the words that Hedges chose to ignore:

It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.

Clearly, I was describing a case in which a hostile regime that is avowedly suicidal acquires long-range nuclear weaponry (i.e. they can hit distant targets like Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, etc.). Of course, not every Muslim regime would fit this description. For instance, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, but they have yet to develop long-range rockets, and there is every reason to believe that the people currently in control of these bombs are more pragmatic and less certain of paradise than the Taliban are. The same might be said of Iran, if it acquires nuclear weapons in the near term (though not from the perspective of Israel, for whom any Iranian bomb will pose a truly existential threat). But the civilized world (including all the pragmatic Muslims living within it) must finally come to terms with what the ideology of groups like al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas, etc., means —because it destroys the logic of deterrence. There are a significant number of people in the Muslim world for whom the slogan “We love death more than the infidels love life” appears to be an honest statement of psychological fact, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from getting long-range nuclear weapons.

I wrote the preceding paragraph in 2019. Since then, Israel and the United States have gone to war with Iran over precisely this question, and I have supported the aim of that war while criticizing much of their conduct. So let me be explicit about what I think. There are three separate claims here. The first is the one from The End of Faith: that a nuclear first strike against a nuclear-armed, avowedly suicidal regime might one day be the only option left to us, and that this would be an unthinkable crime. I still think both halves of that sentence are true. The second is that conventional preventive strikes on a nuclear program, before such a regime acquires the weapon, can be justified. In Iran’s case I think they are, and were long overdue. We are under no obligation to give jihadists the benefit of the doubt, because there is no doubt about their ultimate aims. A regime that has spent decades promising to turn Israel into glass should be taken at its word, and if it was bluffing, that was its mistake to avoid. The third claim concerns deterrence itself. The logic of mutually assured destruction works only because every party that has had nuclear weapons so far has wanted to live. It makes no moral sense—we are pledging to kill tens of millions of people for no purpose once deterrence has failed—but it has kept us perched on the precipice for the better part of a century. Suicide bombers with nuclear weapons change everything. You simply cannot deter people who want to die.

None of this is a claim about the Iranian people, who I believe are sick of theocracy in a way that the Afghans or Iraqis never were. Nor is it an endorsement of how the Trump administration conducted its war—without allies, without preparing the American public, and with a commander in chief who lurched from genocidal threats to abject appeasement within a single news cycle. Wanting a regime gone and trusting this president to remove it are different things.

My views on race, racism, and racial differences

[Written 2018; revised 2019 and November 2026.]

In April of 2017, I published a podcast with Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial (and endlessly misrepresented) book The Bell Curve. The book was an analysis of the cognitive stratification of society and did not focus on race—but it contained a chapter on race and IQ, the negative response to which fully engulfed Murray’s life.

The most provocative claims in the book amount to the following:

1. Human “general intelligence” is a scientifically valid concept.
2. IQ tests do a pretty good job of measuring it.
3. Differences in IQ are highly predictive of success in the modern world.
4. Mean IQ scores differ across populations (blacks < whites < Asians).
5. It isn’t known to what degree differences in IQ are genetically determined, but it seems safe to say that genes play a role (and it’s safe to say that the environment does too).

At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial—but, taken together, they proved disastrous for his reputation among nonscientists (his co-author, Richard Herrnstein, died before the book was published). When I spoke with Murray in 2017, he had just been de-platformed at Middlebury College, a full quarter century after The Bell Curve was published. As he and his host were leaving the auditorium, they were assaulted by an angry mob of students. The incident ranks among the worst, recent examples of moral panic on the left, where conservative thinkers—or those who are merely imagined to be conservative—have been silenced. I decided to have Murray on my podcast to discuss the episode, along with the mischaracterizations of his research that gave rise to it.

As it happens, I have very little interest in IQ testing, and no interest at all in racial differences in intelligence. But I am deeply concerned about the free exchange of ideas—and about its suppression by dogmatists and bullies. Needless to say, I knew that having a friendly conversation with Murray might draw some fire my way. That was, in part, the point. Given the viciousness with which he was scapegoated, I felt that it was a moral imperative to give him some cover.

I have been asked many times since whether I regret that conversation. I don’t. I had Murray on because he had just been violently de-platformed at Middlebury, at the moment when that was becoming an epidemic, and nothing in our conversation suggested that he had a racist political agenda. Had I detected one, I would have felt very differently about speaking with him. Anything he has done since, much of which I may have missed, would have required a time machine to price in. The one question I put to him then, and still consider unanswered, is why he spends time on this topic at all.

In the aftermath of our conversation, many people have sought to paint me as a racist—but few have shown as much zeal for the project as Ezra Klein, the former editor-in-chief of Vox. In response to my podcast, Klein published an article that pretended to offer the scientific consensus on human intelligence, while vilifying Murray as a racist pseudoscientist and me as, at best, his dupe. More likely, readers unfamiliar with my work came away believing that I’m a racist pseudoscientist as well. Rather than merely take issue with our interpretation of the data, the Vox piece accused Murray and me of the most egregious intellectual misconduct.

After reading this attack, Richard Haier, the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence, and the author of the book The Neurobiology of Intelligence, came to our defense, unbidden, with a far more mainstream opinion on the relevant science. And yet Klein refused to publish it. And then he attacked us again, and again. (Haier later published his piece in Quillette. And Andrew Sullivan responded as well.)

After wrangling with Klein on social media and by email, I agreed to do a podcast with him to discuss the controversy that he had manufactured. Many people were thankful that the conversation occurred—though most still found it painful to listen to. It’s yet another bizarre exchange, where two ostensibly smart, morally serious people talk past one another for hours. I have since been asked, as Klein appears to have adjusted his politics in the meantime, whether I would bury the hatchet. I can’t. Had I held a position from which I could be fired, I believe the amount of misinformation he spread about me would have cost me my career. If, decades from now, my daughters read an obituary noting that their father was suspected in certain circles of being a racist, that will largely be because of what Ezra Klein did in 2017, and he has never acknowledged how dishonest it was. He knows I find racism to be as abhorrent as he does. But he worked very hard to produce the opposite impression anyway. One of his co-authors on the Vox piece, the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, told me on my podcast in 2026 that, on rereading it, she was unpleasantly surprised at how much of it argued not that Murray was wrong about the science but that I was wrong to have spoken to him at all. That was my reading too.

Happily, left-leaning opinion has begun to shift on these topics, but many enforcers of the elite consensus have decided to ignore the role they played during the height of the moral panic. As always, cowardice runs freely in either direction. It is worth recalling that Klein was once the sort of woke, swamp creature who would calculate the ratio of black to white guests on a podcast and, finding it lacking, insinuate that the host was a racist. I know, because he did this to me. He also recommended that I enlighten myself, along with my audience, by interviewing the race hustler Ibram X. Kendi. Such, such were the joys.

It was easy to see how ethically and intellectually untenable Klein’s position was. For instance, in 2014 it was discovered that most people on earth are 2.7 percent Neanderthal—that is, everyone who isn’t black. When this discovery was first announced, I posted the following on Twitter: “Attentional all racists: You were right. Whites are special. We’re part Neanderthal. Blacks are just human.” Apart from giving some indication of my views on race and racism prior to the Murray controversy, the moment reveals a dangerous double standard in the politicization of science. In our podcast, I asked Klein to consider what would have happened if the data had broken the other way, and we discovered that the only people on earth who were part Neanderthal happened to be black. Klein dodged the point, as he dodged most others. But he knows exactly what would have happened in the aftermath of such a discovery. Any scientist or journalist left holding those data when the music stopped would have had their reputation destroyed. Klein appeared quite comfortable with this double standard. Indeed, he was working very hard to enshrine it—and to create an atmosphere in which scientific discourse is riven by lies, hypocrisy, scapegoating, and moral cowardice.

Almost everything we value about ourselves and other people is determined both by genetics and by the environment —and it would be a miracle if every trait we value were identically expressed across all groups. Of course, the concept of “race” is ill-defined and can be misleading. There is, for instance, more genetic diversity among people on the continent of Africa than anywhere else. (The common ancestors for most world populations can be found around 50,000 years ago. However, some African groups have been effectively separated for 200,000 years.) Are there many “races” there? Not according to anyone who believes that skin color is the primary signifier of group identity. The truth, however, is that however one defines “race”—whether by reference to polygenetic variations in specific groups, revealing their distinct ancestry, or merely by how modern people “self identify” across census categories—there are likely to be average group differences in traits we care about. This will be true for things like susceptibility to diabetes and prostate cancer, but it is also likely to be true for cognitive, emotional, and behavioral traits as well.

If, for example, we discover all the genetic and environmental factors that determine a person’s propensity for violence, the probability that these factors will be set at precisely the same levels among Norwegians, Japanese, Inuit, Fijians, Masai, etc., is essentially zero. And if, by some miracle, a propensity for violence were identical across all groups, some other important trait will be heavily skewed. Do Americans who believe that their ancestors were “French” and those who believe their ancestors were “Chinese” have the same average height? Almost certainly not. Do they have the same average IQ? Don’t bet on it. Yes, people with high and low values for any trait will be found in every group—and so the variance between individuals will exceed the variance between groups—but nontrivial differences between population averages will also be found. However we study the biological and cultural contributions to our humanity, we will be ambushed by evidence of group differences that will seem—or can be made to seem—politically invidious. The answer to this pseudo problem isn’t to lie about facts and to defenestrate anyone who won’t lie on cue. The answer is to treat people as individuals and reaffirm our commitment to political equality. Our ongoing efforts to create the best possible world cannot depend upon lies.

To reiterate, I did not have Murray on my podcast because I’m interested in racial difference—whether in IQ or in any other trait. I spoke to Murray because I believed that I had witnessed an honest scholar pilloried and shunned for decades. I’d also heard from many prominent scientists who thought that Murray had been treated despicably, but who didn’t have the courage to say so publicly. And their silence bothered me. In fact, every scientist I spoke with about Murray felt that a grave injustice had been done in his case. So I invited him on the podcast. And in order to demonstrate that he’s not a malicious charlatan and a racist, I was obliged to discuss the relevant science. This is the science that Klein calls “racialist pseudoscience” and “America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.” But it’s just science. And people of good will can speak about it honestly, without losing their commitment to political equality.

In June 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, I released a two-hour episode called “Can We Pull Back from the Brink?” It remains the most controversial thing I have said about race. Here is what I argued. Slavery is America’s founding sin, and racism and racial inequality still persist. But the question raised by the video of Floyd’s death was a different one: Do the dozen or so videos of black men killed by police that have emerged in recent years prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men and motivated by racism? If you spend even five minutes with the data, the answer appears to be no. Police kill around a thousand people a year in the United States. About a quarter are black and about half are white. Of the thousand, roughly fifty are unarmed, and more of those are white than black. In Roland Fryer’s study of several cities, police were more likely to use non-lethal force—to push, handcuff, and draw their weapons—against black suspects, but less likely to shoot them. I said that the disparity in non-lethal force was real and bad, that it might be explained by racism or by other things, and that we should find out. I also said that calls to “defund the police” were insane, that the reforms we needed were to training and to tactics like no-knock raids, and that the case of Tony Timpa—a white man killed by Dallas police in circumstances nearly identical to Floyd’s—showed how much of this is about bad policing rather than racism.

One study I cited, by David Johnson and colleagues in PNAS, was later retracted at its authors’ request, because its data could speak to the characteristics of officers who shoot but not to racial disparities in the probability of being shot. Fryer’s work stands. And nothing I have learned since has changed my view of the summer of 2020: It was a moral panic, it empowered the authoritarian politics that followed, and “abolish the police” may be the most self-destructive political slogan to appear in my lifetime. We know the answer to one of the most pressing ethical questions our society has ever faced: We should not care about race. The color of a person’s skin should be like the color of his eyes or hair, in that it should have no political or moral significance. And yet our institutions are now filled with people who, given every morally salient fact about an act of violence—who attacked whom, and why; whether anyone was armed—still won’t know how they feel about it until they learn the skin colors of the people involved.

On May 25, 2018, I released audio from an event I did with Christian Picciolini in Dallas. Picciolini is the former leader of the neo-Nazi gang, Hammerskin Nation, and appears to have spent many years living like a character out of Clockwork Orange. He later turned himself around and became a deprogrammer of white supremacists. Unfortunately, Picciolini said a few things in our podcast that don’t seem to have been true, and I later heard from two people who considered his remarks defamatory. The first was James Damore, the author of the infamous “Google memo.” Picciolini had described Damore as member of the “alt-Right,” to the surprise and consternation of many in our Dallas audience. The second was Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian YouTuber who then had a very large following. Picciolini made two claims about Molyneux that drew protest. He alleged that he is a “Holocaust denier.” (Denying the Holocaust is actually illegal in Canada, so Picciolini was technically accusing him of a crime.) Picciolini also said that Molyneux had a connection to David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK.

While I didn’t know enough about Damore or Molyneux to challenge Picciolini’s claims on stage, I didn’t endorse them, and when we got pushback from the audience, I said that I didn’t know enough to fact check these statements in real time. However, I later came to believe that each of these specific claims were false. Picciolini just seemed flat wrong about Damore (and he later admitted as much by email). As for Molyneux, I don’t doubt that there are many things that one could criticize the man for—he really does appear inordinately concerned about racial differences. However, I later spoke to Molyneux on the phone, after receiving a letter from his attorney, and it was clear from our conversation that Picciolini’s two, specific charges against him were false. Molyneux accepts mainstream historical accounts about the Holocaust—and accepting this history is tantamount to disproving any charge of “Holocaust denial.” He also assured me that he had never spoken to or otherwise communicated with David Duke. It seems that Duke had merely retweeted something he wrote, and Picciolini took this to mean that the two men had formed an alliance. If we’re all culpable for everyone who retweets us, no one will escape hanging.

I reached out to Picciolini to see if he could produce evidence to substantiate his claims, but he could not. In place of evidence, he provided links to other material suggesting that Molyneux is a creep—but nothing that spoke to the issue of “Holocaust denial” or that suggested an association with Duke. When I observed how unsatisfactory the evidence was, Picciolini went properly nuts, and began castigating me as an enabler of white supremacy. Which is a peculiar charge, given that I had him on my podcast to discuss the dangerous idiocy of white supremacy. His emails grew increasingly unhinged—if one read between the lines, he was threatening me with violence for editing my own podcast.

In light of these developments, I decided to edit the original podcast and remove the false allegations. I also apologized to James Damore and Stefan Molyneux for whatever hassle the original audio had caused them. As should be clear, this damage control wasn’t an endorsement of anything these men had said or done (or have said or done since). For the record: Molyneux has always seemed to me to be very shady, and I have never been tempted to have a public conversation with him. As it happens, YouTube removed him in 2020. But none of that bears on whether he denied the Holocaust or conspired with David Duke. In fact, I still don’t know much more about Damore and Molyneux than I did when I was sitting on stage with Picciolini in Dallas. But few things are more despicable than spreading derogatory misinformation about people, whatever their views.

I suppose it’s not much of a surprise that a man who once ran the largest neo-Nazi gang in the United States might have a few, lingering character flaws. But I remain fairly amazed by Picciolini’s behavior. He continued to attack me for years afterward and tried to get me disinvited from speaking engagements. As I concede elsewhere on this page, I have not always been the best judge of other people.

My position on torture

[Written 2011; revised 2019 and November 2026.]

In The End of Faith, I argue that competing religious doctrines have divided our world into separate moral communities and that these divisions have become a continual source of human violence.  My purpose in writing the book was to offer a way of thinking about our world that would render certain forms of conflict quite literally unthinkable.

In one section of the book (pp. 192−199), I briefly discuss the ethics of torture and collateral damage in times of war, arguing that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board. Rather than appreciate just how bad I think collateral damage is in ethical terms, some readers have mistakenly concluded that I take a cavalier attitude toward the practice of torture. I do not. Nevertheless, there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like “water-boarding” may be not only ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary.  This is not the same as saying that they should be legal (Crimes such as trespassing and theft may sometimes be ethically necessary, though everyone has an interest in keeping them illegal).

I am not alone in thinking that there are potential circumstances in which the use of torture would be ethically justifiable. The liberal Senator Charles Schumer has publicly stated that most U.S. senators would support torture to find out the location of a ticking time bomb. Such scenarios have been widely criticized as unrealistic. But realism is not the point of these thought experiments. The point is that unless your argument rules out torture in idealized cases, you don’t have a categorical argument against torture. As nuclear and biological terrorism become increasingly possible, it is in everyone’s interest for men and women of goodwill to determine what should be done if a person appears to have operational knowledge of an imminent atrocity (and may even claim to possess such knowledge), but won’t otherwise talk about it.

My argument for the limited use of coercive interrogation (“torture” by another name) is essentially this: If you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to water-board a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk abusing someone who just happens to look like him). It seems to me that however one compares the practices of water-boarding high-level terrorists and dropping bombs, dropping bombs always comes out looking worse in ethical terms. And yet, most people tacitly accept the practice of modern warfare while considering it taboo to even speak about the possibility of practicing torture. It is important to point out that my argument for the restricted use of torture does not make a travesty like Abu Ghraib look any less sadistic or stupid. I consider our mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to be patently unethical. I also think it was one of the most damaging blunders in the last century of U.S. foreign policy. Nor have I ever seen the wisdom or necessity of denying proper legal counsel (and access to evidence) to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay. Indeed, I consider much of what occurred under Bush and Cheney—the routine abuse of ordinary prisoners, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” etc.—to be a stain upon our nation.

Some people believe that while collateral damage may be worse than torture, they are independent evils, and one problem sheds no light upon the other. However, they are not independent in principle. In fact, it is easy to see how information gained through torture might mitigate the risk of collateral damage. If one found oneself with an apparent choice between torturing a known terrorist and bombing civilians, torturing the terrorist should seem like the more ethical option. But most people’s intuitions seem to run the other way. In fact, very few critics of my collateral-damage argument even acknowledge how strangely asymmetrical our worries about torture and collateral damage are. A conversation about the ethics of torture can scarcely be had, and yet collateral damage is often reported in the context of a “successful” military operation as though it posed no ethical problem whatsoever. The case of Baitullah Mehsud, killed along with 12 others (including his wife and mother-in-law), is a perfect example: Had his wife been water-boarded in order to obtain the relevant intelligence, rather than merely annihilated by a missile, we can be sure that this would have produced torrents of outrage.

It seems, in fact, that many people do not understand what the phrase “collateral damage” signifies, and thus they imagine that I have drawn a false analogy. Most assume that my analogy fails because torture is the intentional infliction of guaranteed suffering, whereas collateral damage is the unintentional imposition of possible suffering (or death). Apples and oranges.

But this isn’t true. We often drop bombs knowing that innocent people will be killed or horribly injured by them. We target buildings in which combatants are hiding, knowing that noncombatants are also in those buildings, or standing too close to escape destruction. And when innocent people are killed or injured—when children are burned over most of their bodies and survive only to suffer interminable pain and horrible disfigurement—our leaders accept this as the cost of doing business in a time of war. Many people oppose specific wars, of course—such as the war in Iraq—but no public figure has been vilified for accepting collateral damage in a war deemed to be just. And yet, anyone who would defend the water-boarding of a terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad will reap a whirlwind of public criticism. This makes no moral sense.

Again, which is worse: water-boarding a terrorist or killing/maiming him? Which is worse, water-boarding an innocent person or killing/maiming him? There are journalists who have volunteered to be water-boarded. Where are the journalists who have volunteered to have a 2000-pound bomb dropped on their homes with their families inside?

It is widely claimed that torture “does not work”—that it produces unreliable information, implicates innocent people, etc. As I argue in The End of Faith, this line of defense does not resolve the underlying ethical dilemma. The claim that torture never works, or that it always produces bad information, is incredible (and well known to be false). There are cases in which the mere threat of torture has worked. One can easily imagine situations in which even a very low probability of getting useful information through torture would seem to justify it—the looming threat of nuclear terrorism being the most obvious case. It is decidedly unhelpful that those who claim to know that torture is “always wrong” never seem to envision the circumstances in which good people would be tempted to use it. Critics of my collateral-damage argument always ignore the hard case: when the person in custody is known to have been involved in appalling acts of violence and when the threat of further atrocities is imminent. If you think such situations never arise, consider what it might be like to capture a high-ranking member of al Qaeda along with several accomplices and their computers. The possibility that such a person might really be “innocent” or that he could “just say anything” to mislead his interrogators begins to seem less of a concern. Such captures bring us closer to a “ticking-bomb” scenario than many people are willing to admit.

Although I think that torture should remain illegal, it is not clear that having a torture provision in our laws would create as slippery a slope as many people imagine. We have a capital punishment provision, but it has not led to our killing prisoners at random because we can’t control ourselves. While I am generally opposed to capital punishment, I can readily admit that our executing 2-4 people every month in America hasn’t led to total moral chaos. Perhaps a rule regarding torture could be applied with equal restraint.

It seems probable, however, that any legal use of torture would have unacceptable consequences. In light of this concern, the best strategy I have heard comes from Mark Bowden in his Atlantic Monthly article “The Dark Art of Interrogation.” Bowden recommends that we keep torture illegal and maintain a policy of not torturing anybody for any reason—but our interrogators should know that there are certain circumstances in which it would be ethical to break the law. Indeed, there are circumstances in which you would have to be a monster not to break the law. If an interrogator found himself in such a circumstance and broke the law, there would be little will to prosecute him (and interrogators would know this). If he breaks the law Abu Ghraib-style, he will go to prison for a very long time (and interrogators would know this too). At the moment, this seems like the most reasonable policy to me.

The best case against “ticking-bomb” arguments appears in David Luban’s article, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” published in the Virginia Law Review. Luban relies on a few questionable assumptions, however. And he does not actually provide an ethical argument against torture in the ticking-bomb case; he offers a pragmatic argument against our instituting a policy allowing torture in such cases.  There is absolutely nothing in Luban’s argument that rules out the following law:

We will not torture anyone under any circumstances unless we are certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the person in our custody has operational knowledge of an imminent act of nuclear terrorism.

It seems to me that unless one can produce an ethical argument against torturing such a person, one does not have an argument against the use of torture in principle.  Of course, my discussion of torture in The End of Faith (and on this page) addresses only the ethics of torture—not the practical difficulties of implementing a policy based on the ethics.

Many readers have found my views on this topic deeply unsettling. I do too. It would be much easier to simply be “against torture” across the board and end the discussion. I have invited readers, both publicly and privately, to produce an ethical argument that takes into account the realities of our world—our daily acceptance of collateral damage, the real possibility of nuclear terrorism, etc.—and yet rules out a practice like water-boarding in all conceivable circumstances. No one, to my knowledge, has done this. And yet, most people continue to speak and write as though a knockdown argument against torture in all circumstances were readily available. I consider it to be one of the more dangerous ironies of liberal discourse that merely discussing the possibility of torturing a man like Osama bin Laden provokes more outrage than the maiming and murder of children ever does. Until someone actually points out what is wrong with the collateral-damage argument presented in The End of Faith, I will continue to believe that its critics are just not thinking clearly about the reality of human suffering. (And, for what it’s worth, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy basically takes the same view.)

Readers who follow my writing on Israel will notice that the argument above rests on the same premise as my claim that there is no moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. In both cases, intentions matter. Collateral damage is a grave harm that we accept far too casually; but the intentional massacre of civilians for the purpose of maximizing horror is a different and worse thing. Some critics have tried to run these positions against each other—as though a man who thinks collateral damage is worse than torture must condemn Israel’s collateral damage above all. But the comparison in this section is between two ways of treating a known terrorist, not between a terrorist and a child. The position is consistent. Our intuitions aren’t.

My discussion of killing people “for what they believe” (pp. 52-53 in The End of Faith)

[Written 2013; revised November 2026.]

The following passage seems to have been selectively quoted, and misconstrued, more than any other I have written:

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

This paragraph appears after a long discussion of the role that belief plays in governing human behavior, and it should be read in that context. Some critics have interpreted the second sentence of this passage to mean that I advocate simply killing religious people for their beliefs. Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been, but such a reading remains a frank distortion of my views. To someone reading the passage in context, it should be clear that I am discussing the link between belief and behavior. The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous.

When one asks why it was ethical to drop a bomb on Ayman al-Zawahiri, who led al Qaeda until a U.S. drone strike killed him in Kabul in July 2022, the answer cannot be, “Because he killed so many people in the past.” To my knowledge, the man never killed anyone personally. But he was certain to get a great many innocent people killed because of what he and his followers believed about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. A willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty. Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in many cases this is either impossible or too risky. Would it have been better if we had captured Osama bin Laden? In my view, yes. Do I think the members of Seal Team Six should have assumed any added risk to bring him back alive? Absolutely not.

My position on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran

[Written 2013; revised November 2026.]

I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it was a disaster. Much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, and one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people. Whatever one may think about the rationale for invading Iraq and the prosecution of the war, there is nothing about the conflict that makes Islam look benign—not the reflexive solidarity expressed throughout the Muslim world for Saddam Hussein (merely because an army of “infidels” attacked him), not the endless supply of suicide bombers willing to kill Iraqi noncombatants, not the insurgency’s use of women and children as human shields, not the ritual slaughter of journalists and aid workers, not the steady influx of jihadis from neighboring countries, and not the state of public opinion among European and American Muslims. It seems to me that no reasonable person can conclude that these phenomena are purely the result of U.S. foreign policy. And, with the hindsight of two decades, it is also hard to argue that the world and the Iraqi people would be better off had Sadaam Hussein and his psychopathic sons been left in place.

Our initial invasion of Afghanistan seemed to me obviously warranted, and even necessary. The project of nation-building there did not immediately seem as hopeless as it proved to be, and the way it ended—abandoning the girls who had risked their lives to learn to read, and the secularists and liberals who had bet on us—was an abject and tragic failure.

The question I now get is with respect to Iran. Having never supported the war in Iraq, why would I support regime change in Tehran? Because I think we drew the wrong lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan if we concluded that Iran was a hopeless case. Iran has a population that is more sophisticated, and more tired of theocracy, than the Iraqis or Afghans ever were, and it has a jihadist regime which declared war on the West 47 years ago and is committed to wiping Israel off the map. The case for removing that regime has always been stronger than the case for removing Saddam Hussein. Of course, the case against trusting the Trump administration to do it competently has been strong too. In short, I think that this was the right war, waged by the wrong people.

My views on rape

[Written 2014; revised 2019.]

I don’t harbor any controversial views about rape, but several malicious people have worked very hard to make it seem as though I do. Rape is evil, and I believe it should be judged extraordinarily harshly by any civilized society. However, I’ve said a few things that, lifted out of context, can be spun to make it seem as though I don’t consider rape to be a serious crime. For instance, I once said in an interview that “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”

Here is the context:

Saltman: Isn’t religion a natural outgrowth of human nature?

Harris: It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think of arguing that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it’s a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in a twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas. Traditionally, religion has been the receptacle of some good and ennobling features of our psychology. It’s the arena in which people talk about contemplative experience and ethics. And I do think contemplative experience and ethics are absolutely essential to human happiness. I just think we now have to speak about them without endorsing any divisive mythology.

Saltman: Your analogy between organized religion and rape is pretty inflammatory. Is that intentional?

Harris: I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive.

It is, of course, an empirical question whether “more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology.” I’m not sure whether I believe that this is true in the year 2019, but I certainly believed it in 2006. In any case, I remain confident that the enormity of unnecessary bigotry, violence, political oppression, and psychological misery—and, indeed, the vast number of rapes—directly attributable to religion make my original statement easy to defend. And these harms are not offset by the many good things people get from religion—community, spirituality, ethics, etc.—which can be had directly, at no cost to our understanding of the world or of one another. My comments, in this context, were meant to convey just how bad I think religion is, not that I take the crime of rape lightly. For instance, I worry that jihadists will one day detonate crude nuclear bombs in major cities, killing hundreds of thousands of people and deranging human history for an entire generation (causing billions to suffer and many millions more to die). This scenario doesn’t seem at all far-fetched, and magically ridding the world of religion would close the door to it. It would also end the epidemic of child rape in the Catholic Church, rape as a tool of war (in those cases where its purpose is to exploit the religious taboos of the victimized community), along with sexual enslavement (more rape) of non-Muslim women by groups like the Islamic State. Indeed, the list of harms that I attribute directly to religion can be extended indefinitely, subsuming innumerable instances of rape along the way. I am confident that those who circulate the abbreviated, inflammatory quotation to make me look like a rape apologist understand this.

As above, I also reference rape to illustrate the vast gulf between what is “natural” and what is “good.” Here is how I put it in my second book, Letter to a Christian Nation (pp. 90-91):

As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past. Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.

As should be clear, I was hoping to close the door to the specious claim that, just because a behavior might have proved adaptive in the past (in that it allowed our ancestors to successfully spread their genes), we should venerate it in the present. Again, my words in context do not suggest that I view rape as anything less than evil. However, certain of my “critics” have decided to spread my thoughts on the topic this way:

“There is nothing more natural than rape.” — Sam Harris

I hope I never grow so cynical as to get used to this behavior.

My views on the paranormal: ESP, reincarnation, etc.

[Written 2013; revised November 2026.]

My position on the paranormal is this: Although many frauds have been perpetrated in the history of parapsychology, I believe that this field of study has been unfairly stigmatized. If some experimental psychologists want to spend their days studying telepathy, or the effects of prayer, I will be interested to know what they find out. And if it is true that toddlers occasionally start speaking in ancient languages (as Ian Stevenson alleged), I would like to know about it. However, I have not attempted to authenticate the data put forward in books such as Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe and Ian Stevenson’s 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The fact that I have not spent any time on this should suggest how worthy of my time I think such a project would be. Still, I found these books interesting, and I cannot categorically dismiss their contents in the way that I can dismiss the claims of religious dogmatists. (Here, I am making a point about gradations of certainty: Can I say for certain that a century of experimentation proves that telepathy doesn’t exist? No. It seems to me that reasonable people can disagree about the statistical data. Can I say for certain that the Bible and the Qur’an show every sign of having been written by ignorant mortals? Yes. And this is the only certainty one needs to dismiss the God of Abraham as a creature of fiction.)

While I remain open to evidence of psi phenomena—clairvoyance, telepathy, and so forth—the fact that they haven’t been conclusively demonstrated in the lab is a very strong indication that they do not exist. Researchers who study these things allege that the data are there and that proof of psi can be seen in departures from randomness that occur over thousands of experimental trials. But people who believe in psi aren’t thinking in terms of weak, statistical effects. They believe that a specific person can reliably read minds, heal the sick, and work other miracles. I have yet to see a case in which evidence for such abilities was presented in a credible way. If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab. Many people have been duped by traditional evasions on this point; it is often said, for instance, that demonstrating such powers on demand would be spiritually uncouth and that even to want such empirical evidence is an unflattering sign of doubt on the part of a student. Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe (John 4:48). A lifetime of foolishness and self-deception awaits anyone who won’t call this bluff.

Three additions, since clips of my remarks on these subjects continue to circulate:

On UFOs: In May 2021, I said on Lex Fridman’s podcast that the U.S. government appeared poised to tell Congress it had evidence of technology that couldn’t be of human origin, and that if so, nothing in our lifetimes would be more consequential. I was describing what disclosure would mean if it came, not asserting that it had. And it still hasn’t.

On psychedelics: I consider these compounds among the most important tools we have for understanding the mind. Reports of “entities” met by users of DMT are a fascinating. However, they are not, so far as anyone has shown, evidence of anything outside the brain.

On near-death experiences: Clearly, almost dying can be associated with a range of profound experiences. But these experiences are merely what living brains produce under certain conditions. They do not (and cannot) constitute evidence that conscious experience persists after death.

My views on Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, etc.

[Written 2013; revised November 2026.]

My views on “mystical” or “spiritual” experience are extensively described in my book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion and in the Waking Up app. Nothing I believe in this area is based on faith. There is no question that people can have transformative experiences through practices like meditation and that these experiences shed some light on the nature of the human mind. (Any experience does, for that matter). However, the metaphysical claims that people tend to make on the basis of such experiences are highly questionable. I do not make any such claims myself. Nor do I support the metaphysical claims of others.

Several neuroscience labs are now studying the effects of meditation on the brain. I’m not personally engaged in this research, but I know many of the scientists who are. This is a fertile area of inquiry that is deepening our understanding of human well-being.

While I consider Buddhism to be almost unique among the world’s religions as a repository of contemplative wisdom, I do not consider myself a Buddhist. My criticism of Buddhism as a faith has been published, to the consternation of many Buddhists. It is available here:

Killing the Buddha