Sam Harris Syndrome

a variant of TDS for the ruling elite

A new and potentially lethal variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) emerged last week. Like the Omicron variant of Covid, it laid waste specious government and media narratives and revealed the true objectives — profit and power — of the tendentious TDS victims who claim to be operating and reporting in the public interest.

Omicron revealed the ruinous anti-science folly of lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, just as it laid bare the shameful abuse of isolating children at the perverse behest of teachers unions and ethically bereft career politicians and bureaucrats. Likewise, the new variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome reveals the despotic corruption of corporate media, the technomedia cartel, the Department of Homeland Security, the DOJ, the FBI, the entire state security apparatus, the January 6th Committee and the progressive pathology of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The new TDS variant exposes those who — like the imperial lords of Covid — justify their perfidy and calumny as essential to protect us from ourselves.

I call this new TDS variant “Sam Harris Syndrome” (SHS) in honor of the renowned intellectual atheist who — apparently in the throes of late-stage TDS — revealed his conviction that censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of a general election was actually good for us, a justifiable response to what he called an existential threat.

Like so many other TDS-afflicted intellectuals, Mr. Harris stubbornly clings to the foolish and delusional belief that the suspension of liberal democratic and Enlightenment ideals is somehow required to save democracy. More grotesquely, he — like all the others now afflicted with Sam Harris Syndrome — envisions himself as the savior of the Republic in a vulgar display of pure intellectual elitism.

Sam Harris Syndrome is what happens when Trump Derangement Syndrome rises to the level of public policy. The imminent danger that lurks deep in the DNA of both TDS and SHS is the shamefully expedient belief that we can somehow set our liberal democratic and Enlightenment ideals aside just long enough to deal with a perceived (or manufactured) crisis, then reclaim them once the danger has passed. Well, we can’t. And to pretend otherwise is the height of arrogance.

Of course, the best way to preserve your own elitist savior status once afflicted with either TDS or the new SHS variant is to insure that there’s always a new existential threat or crisis to defend against — as suggested some years ago by Rahm Emanuel when he cautioned his fellow Democrats never to let a good crisis go to waste.

Enter the January 6th Committee, Liz Chaney’s much improved upgrade to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of Joseph McCarthy. Ostensibly convened to investigate what went wrong on January 6th, the committee was in fact convened as a TDS super-spreader event, a pathologically perverse attempt to cripple Trump and jail opponents of the Biden regime.

Sam Harris Syndrome kicked in the very moment the committee hired a professional network TV producer to take them prime time. The message was pure Sam Harris: We need to shut down democracy in order to save it — a thankless task assumed only with the heaviest of hearts, or so committee members told us over and over ad nauseum.

Now think Covid, when blue-state and blue-city leaders all but eliminated the entire First Amendment — again, for our own good. The initial emergency response of blue-state governors and blue-city mayors may have been properly deontological, but by the summer of 2020 and the expedient suspension of blue-city lockdowns for BLM protests and riots, it was clear that the ongoing response had been co-opted by the consequentialism of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Suddenly, systemic racism and white supremacy were somehow deadlier than Covid – but only because Donald Trump was in the House and TDS was in the streets.

By late fall of that same year, Florida, South Dakota and other red states had already accrued more than sufficient empirical data to prove that Covid posed no statistical risk whatsoever to school children. Clearly, school lockdowns in blue states and cities had nothing to do with science and everything to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The same heavy-handed state response to 9/11 that enraged liberal intellectual icon Noam Chomsky back in the early 21st century claimed him as an unwitting victim of Sam Harris Syndrome a generation later when he called for the unvaccinated to be forcibly isolated from society to protect the vaccinated population from Omicron. The utter lunacy of such illogic aside, he understood full well that doing so was a total abrogation of every liberal principle he’d preached for decades.

“You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.”
— Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

Of course, Trump Derangement Syndrome had already poisoned his soul some years before. Ever-opportunistic, the dormant SHS variant deep within him awakened to the animal scent of fear and seized the moment: Segregating the unvaccinated, he said, was the only way to save society from itself. Like the villains he despised, Mr. Chomsky had assumed — even if for just the briefest of interludes — the heavy mantle of a reluctant savior.

Therein we discover the functional differences between TDS and SHS: The addictive narcosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome cannot be acknowledged. Doing so would expose the petty illiberalism and unseemly classism of those infected by the virus. By contrast, Sam Harris Syndrome must be acknowledged. Acknowledgement of SHS is how the ruling elite pay homage to themselves and their noble mission to save the rest of us from our undereducated and deplorable selves.

Where Trump Derangement Syndrome is a dirty secret best kept under wraps, Sam Harris Syndrome is a revelatory and missionary call to action for the elite ruling class. How else would we know just how selfless, beneficent and magnanimous they truly are?

Or how fearful. Like gout in the days of Henry VIII, Sam Harris Syndrome is a disease of an already sick and arrogant ruling elite. It’s what happens when those with TDS stare too long into the abyss. More precisely, it’s what happens when the abyss stares back.