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On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said there was “a conspiracy to get rid of” former President Donald Trump by the media, who buried the Hunter Biden story “because they were like, we can’t risk having the election thrown to Trump, we’ll tell them after the election.” Maher said, “[M]y friend Sam Harris was on a podcast…they were talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was a story and now all the mainstream press has finally admitted it was a real story, it was a real laptop — now look, let’s not pussyfoot around this, he was...

Sam Harris deserves our gratitude. With dazzling honesty, the liberal atheist...has said out loud what we all knew but which his ilk have blurred for the past two years: Once you decide Donald Trump is the second coming of Adolf Hitler, then anything is legitimate to stop him — and, yes, everything illegitimate was done to stop him in 2020, and it was “warranted.” Skip It has progressed to the next stage, of stigmatizing and dehumanizing Trump’s supporters.... The dozens of Trump supporters held in a DC jail without trial for months and even years over Jan. 6 offenses, many...

...But as the members of the Intellectual Dark Web become genuinely popular, they are also coming under more scrutiny. On April 21, Kanye West crystallized this problem when he tweeted seven words that set Twitter on fire: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” Candace Owens, the communications director for Turning Point USA, is a sharp, young, black conservative — a telegenic speaker with killer instincts who makes videos with titles like “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation” and “The Left Thinks Black People Are Stupid.” Mr. West’s praise for her was sandwiched inside a longer thread that referenced many...

By bizarrely going after Sam Harris, Majid Nawaaz, and others, the once venerable organization has abandoned its core mission, focusing instead on dirty partisan politics Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, a lot of people I knew wrote biggish checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They weren’t alone: According to tax filings, the group took in $136 million last year alone, bringing its total assets to a whopping half-a-billion dollars.This surge in the organization’s popularity makes sense: The SPLC, after all, is the group that had once, nearly four decades ago, protected Vietnamese shrimpers...

Ignoring the politics of it for the moment, check out this video of Sam Harris debating Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Real Time show. I’ll teach you how to spot cognitive dissonance in the clip. Watch for the moment Ben has to hallucinate Sam’s opinion from the reasonable position that many Muslims worldwide have non-liberal views to an hallucination about “All Muslims are bad.” Sam and Bill both clarify their viewpoints, with data, but Ben is struck deaf to it. All he can hear is the absurd absolute “all.” He is literally hallucinating. I mean that literally. If you asked...

No doubt many of my readers know about the encounter about Islam [1] between Ben Affleck, the Hollywood actor, and Sam Harris, the “New Atheist” writer and neuroscientist, on Bill Maher’s show. I do not know Ben Affleck’s work as an actor, so I don’t know whether he is commonly cast in comic roles. He was pretty funny, in a slightly deranged sort of way, on Bill Maher’s show, but perhaps that is his usual modus operandi. I propose to leave the substance — if “substance” is the correct word — of Mr. Affleck’s effusions to one side. His performance...

The most controversial thing I said was: “We have to be able to criticize bad ideas, and Islam is the Mother lode of bad ideas.” This statement has been met with countless charges of “bigotry” and “racism” online and in the media. But imagine that the year is 1970, and I said: “Communism is the Mother lode of bad ideas.” How reasonable would it be to attack me as a “racist” or as someone who harbors an irrational hatred of Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, etc. This is precisely the situation I am in. My criticism of Islam is a criticism of...

Last Friday night a rare dialogue/debate took place on American television. It was rare because it involved criticism of Islam, one of the many taboo subjects that are labeled "politically incorrect." And it took place on the program "Real Time with Bill Maher," a show not generally known for taking politically incorrect positions. But on this night the host, Bill Maher, along with atheism-advocate Sam Harris, had a vigorous debate with Actor Ben Affleck, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. Bill Maher, a man of the left on virtually every issue, began...

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many...

Sam Harris seeks to instruct humanity with regards to morality. Is it moral, one may ask, to puff up your book sales? Well, according to Sam Harris the answer is “Yes,” or is it “No,” or perhaps a definite “Maybe.”... This is all in keeping with his media manipulation savviness—whereby he and his fellow New Atheists have become instant celebrities...

...typical Sam Harris; get you feeling something real so that any logic that attempts to overturn his argument seems oh so very abstract and ethereal. What is an idea compared to an emotion? One is tangible the other is not. How do you argue against emotion? Keep this in mind as it is a favorite New Atheist tactic. Indeed, within paragraphs he will mention “raping children,” “a 9-year-old girl raped by her stepfather”... This is part of why atheistic ethics or morals are an infinite regress of assertions: when they assert that the premise is human flourishing you can ask...

...keep in mind that as you consider Dr. Sam Harris’ prescriptions for morality that this is the very same Sam Harris, supposed champion of reason (and now science) who prescribed capital punishment for thought crime, Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. He also blames deaths of the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust on…on the Jews themselves: The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves. This...

Letter to a Christian Nation Sam Harris, Knopf, $16.95, 112 pages   For those unaware of Sam Harris, his bestseller The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason established him as the American atheist laureate, the Yankee counterpart of the Brits' Richard Dawkins. Now comes the inevitable follow-up: Harris has composed a Letter to a Christian Nation for our edification. Harris is no H. L. Mencken. He is not even in Dawkins's league. But, I confess, I like him anyway. Unlike many of our culture's atheists who pretend to be friendly to religion -- and speak to...

See Part I of my NewsReal Sunday discussion of Friday night's interview between Bill Maher and Sam Harris on Real Time. Leftist comedian Bill Maher just can't help being a jackass even toward people he respects. You'd think that if anyone could get him to at least attempt to grasp the value in the religious experience it would be believers who share his "progressive" political faith: Maher: I have unending respect for Bill Moyers. He's a brilliant man. He's also a Baptist minister. Jimmy Carter, y'know, a pretty bright guy. How do we reconcile someone who is so intelligent but...

PRESIDENT OBAMA has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published “The Language of God,” in which he claimed to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity. Dr. Collins is regularly praised by secular scientists for what he...

For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost. –Stephen Jay Gould [Y]ou’ve heard me complain about scientific organizations that sell evolution by insisting that it’s perfectly consistent with religion. Evolution, they say, threatens many peoples’ religious views — not just the literalism of Genesis, but also the morality that supposedly emanates from scripture. Professional societies like the National Academy of Sciences — the most elite organization of American...

For example, Dr Eugenie Scott of the staunchly anticreationist National Center for Science Education (NCSE) revealed their agenda when she said: “ … I would describe myself as a humanist or a nontheist. I have found that the most effective allies for evolution are people of the faith community. One clergyman with a backward collar is worth two biologists at a school board meeting any day! … What we [such clergy and atheists] have in common is that we want to see evolution taught in the public schools … .”4

"Written for and inspired by President Barack Obama, and now in support of Vice President, running mate, Joe Biden." CHANGE IS ON THE WAY (A tribute to Barack Obama) Change -- Change -- Change Change is on the way. Change -- Change -- Change Change is on the way. But, hey -- but, hey -- hey! Listen to me, when I say... That I feel... -- Change! It's in the air! -- Change! It's everywhere! -- Change! ... and we aint gonna pass this way again. -- Change! So, take my hand, -- Change! and take a stand. --...

Not all atheists are supercilious, of course. Many are content to live and let live, and some even grant that religion (which, in America, basically means Christianity) does some good. But atheism as an organized, evangelizing movement has been on the offensive lately. Witness the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, with their aggressive stance against God and their bestselling books attempting to debunk religion. So, assuming you are a theist, what do you say to the atheist who asks, "You don't (chuckle) actually believe in God, do you (snicker)?" The natural response would be...