Welcome to the Making Sense podcast.

This is Sam Harris.

I've got a fair amount of pushback which to my eye rests on a misunderstanding.

I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't see the grounds for this misunderstanding when

I recorded the last podcast.

But it really does seem like a misunderstanding.

So let me clear this up.

I've gotten a fair amount of grief for my claim that the police response at the Capitol

would not have been much different.

Had that been a BLM protest that became a siege.

I was pushing back against the claim that the behavior of the cops at the Capitol was

a sign of white supremacy, white privilege.

You know, the general racializing of the interpretation of the failure to protect the

Capitol, which was happening everywhere and you know, from Biden on down.

And I stand by everything I said there, but I didn't recognize that this concept of

police response was open to two meanings.

And many people took it to mean something that I would call police presence.

Other than the behavior of the cops who were actually there, many people alleged that there

simply would have been more cops there had this been a BLM protest.

And that the fact that there weren't is a sign of racism.

Racism because they were assuming that white people would be well behaved and they would

have assumed that black people would have gone mad and attacked the Capitol.

...