Closing Arguments

It’s choosing time. Tomorrow morning, when the first polls open in Vermont at 5 a.m. ET, Americans will vote for the 47th president. For those of you who are still undecided—or perhaps thinking of sitting this one out—we wanted to offer you the strongest closing arguments we’ve encountered. Not from Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but from Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris.

We had Ben and Sam on Honestly last week for a wide-ranging debate and the response was overwhelming—more than a million people have watched it on YouTube so far. If you missed it, watch here:

Given that we aren’t endorsing anyone in this election, for reasons I explain here, we thought we’d give them the opportunity to present their closing arguments. These pieces originally appeared on Sam Harris’s Substack and on The Daily Wire, and we’re reprinting them in full. Our thanks to Sam and Ben. —BW

Here’s Sam Harris:

There is a positive case to be made for the candidacy of Kamala Harris, but it is not as compelling as the negative one that has been building these last nine years against her opponent, Donald Trump. When I think of Harris winning the presidency this week, it’s like watching a film of a car crash run in reverse: the windshield unshatters; stray objects and bits of metal converge; and defenseless human bodies are hurled into states of perfect repose. Normalcy descends out of chaos. In the same way, many of the reasons to hope for a future Harris administration bear the signs of a peculiar, counterfactual origin: the appalling prospect of Trump winning a second term as president of the United States.

For anyone who spent the last nine years mostly ignoring Trump, while watching in horror as the Democratic Party slid ever leftward toward the precipice and the Great Wokeness beyond, the positive case for Harris must be made carefully, and with some casuistry. But it is simple enough to do. The truth of the matter is that the good woman was for every reasonable thing before she was against it—and she’s for these things again now, you can be sure. In fact, much the same can be said about the Democratic Party. I am willing to bet that there is not a single person within the Harris campaign, wielding authority sufficient to produce a cup of coffee, who has any doubt about whether we have a problem along our southern border. Nor will you find anyone willing to defund the police or to fund gender-reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in detention. And there is probably no one on Earth who still believes that advancing a lab-leak hypothesis for the origins of Covid is “racist.” The spell cast in 2019 by blue-haired lunatics who identify as blue-haired lunatics has finally broken.    

KEEP READING SAM’S CASE FOR KAMALA.

And here’s Ben Shapiro:

So, it’s down to the wire. According to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, Donald Trump is up in national polling—by 0.1 percent. In Georgia, he’s leading by 2.3 percent; in North Carolina, by 1.5 percent; in Pennsylvania, by 0.3 percent; in Arizona, by 2.6 percent; in Nevada, by 1 percent. Meanwhile, according to that same average, Harris is leading in Michigan by 0.6 percent and in Wisconsin by 0.3 percent. Suffice it to say, every single one of these battleground states is well within the margin of error—meaning that a significant polling error in Trump’s favor turns the election into a blowout for him, and a significant polling error in Harris’s direction turns it into a blowout for her. 

In short, the early votes tell us. . . pretty much nothing. They show that the Republicans have done a far better job than in 2020 of getting out the early vote, but those may be high-propensity voters who were going to vote for Trump anyway. Meanwhile, female voters are, indeed, showing up in droves—but the same story applies.

Here’s the bottom line: Stop reading chicken entrails and GO VOTE NOW. On Friday, I voted early. And I voted, of course, for Donald Trump.

KEEP READING BEN’S CASE FOR TRUMP.

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