What the Left Gets Wrong About Inequality | Sam Harris on the Commune Podcast

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]This weird journey that many people have taken where they got radicalized mostly by how they were treated badly and they get vilified by people who they really shared like 99% of their political concerns with and intuitions with. Right. And they simultaneously get love bombed by people to the right of them. I went on a project in 2020 to have as many conversations as I possibly could with folks on the right and a lot of rural folks. I developed a a number of what I call my friend-enemies really.

[00:00:32]>> There was one woman in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania and I would have these long calls with her and you know, she would send me photos of their barbecues where they would actually take the time to hang a Trump banner in a public park. I mean, it's just like wow.

[00:00:47]>> was at a time where white privilege was being tossed about like a cornhole bag and she was like, I'm a single mother of two. This is a white woman with two minimum wage part-time jobs. Yeah. And I shop at 7-Eleven and I have diabetes and I can barely afford my insulin payments.

[00:01:10]You're going to call me privileged, right? You're going to shame [snorts] me over and over again. You know, I really had to hear that. It's a huge mistake and even if you're going to grant, which you should grant, that disparities in privilege are still correlated with race in America, right?

[00:01:28]>> Sure. I mean, just take economic inequality. Like white families on average have eight times the amount of accumulated wealth than black families.

[00:01:35]Okay, so that's real. That's a real form of privilege, but the way to target those inequalities is to focus on class.

[00:01:43]The outcomes that matter. If you're worried about wealth inequality, then worry about wealth inequality. If you're worried about educational outcomes or or medical outcomes or levels of crime, those disparities are all worth worrying about, but they're being castigated about how much you know, privilege they have. It's just it it is failed sanity test for Democrats to not have noticed where all that was headed.