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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the malicious prosecution of James Comey and what it reveals about Donald Trump’s growing power over the justice system. He explains how the United States, unlike other advanced democracies, has allowed prosecutions to become instruments of presidential will, why Watergate-era norms of independence have eroded, and how the Supreme Court’s recent rulings have accelerated the drift toward one-man rule.

Then Frum is joined by Sam Harris—author, podcaster, and creator of the Waking Up app—for a conversation about Silicon Valley’s dark political evolution toward authoritarianism. They discuss how the emancipatory optimism of the early internet gave way to surveillance, manipulation, and the shattering of shared reality; why prominent tech figures are embracing authoritarian politics; and how conspiracy, anti-vaccine movements, and the pursuit of profit have corroded the culture of innovation.

Finally, David closes with a discussion of Robert Proctor’s The Nazi War on Cancer. He notes how the Nazi regime advanced anti-smoking and cancer-prevention campaigns even as it committed atrocities, tracing the deeper links between politics and health. Drawing a parallel to today, David connects that history to the rise of the MAHA movement: where anti-vaccine ideology and wellness grifts overlap with MAGA politics, fueled by distrust of experts and a refusal of solidarity and empathy with the sick and suffering. He argues that the Trump administration is recasting health as a test of personal virtue to reinforce its authoritarian project.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Sam Harris, and we’ll discuss the turn in the politics of Silicon Valley away from some of the hopeful politics that prevailed in the past to a dark, authoritarian politics that determines the present. Sam will help me to understand why this happened and how, and what it may mean for the politics of the rest of the country.

In the book section, I’ll be discussing a 1999 historical classic by Robert Proctor. But before getting to those subjects of the middle and the end of the show, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about the recent malicious prosecution of James Comey by the [Donald] Trump administration.

This podcast will release on the 1st of October, and by then we may be in a government shutdown. If that does happen, I will have some thoughts next week on what happened and why and what to do about it. But I don’t want to speculate here about hypothetical contingencies when we have this glaring, shocking event from the recent past that needs to be discussed a little bit.

What I want to add to this conversation—because a lot has been said, some of it, I’ve been on television, and I’ve done some writing about it for The Atlantic—I want to put this story of this malicious prosecution into a larger institutional context, a global context.

Now, what happened to James Comey is something that really could not happen in most other developed countries. I mean, imagine supposing you’re, for example, the chancellor of Germany, and you decide you want to indict a political opponent. How would you go about doing it? The short answer is: You couldn’t, and if you tried, you’d probably end up in handcuffs yourself. Because the person who handles all the prosecutions in Germany, to whom every one of the hundreds of German federal prosecutors answers, is a director of public prosecutions—it’s got a very complicated German title, but that’s the basic idea. This person is typically a career civil servant. The current holder of the office is a man named Jens Rommel—no relation to the famous general—and he has devoted his lifetime to the service of the German courts and legal system. The German public prosecutor, federal prosecutor, is appointed by the president of the German state on the advice of the minister of justice, and then has to be confirmed by the German Bundesrat, the upper house of the German legislature.

Now, the chancellor has absolutely no rule in this, and not only no rule, but typically—because Germany’s governed by coalitions—the chancellor and the minister of justice, who will nominate the probable prosecutor, are from different political parties. Right now, the chancellor is a Christian Democrat, but the minister of justice is a Social Democrat, and so is the president of the German state. So multi parties are involved in this, and the Bundesrat—which is produced by the 16 German states and whose membership constantly fluctuates, as each state has its own elections on its own timetable—is a stew of many other parties. So whoever gets this job is going to have broad acceptance in German society, and the chancellor has no role whatsoever and no influence on the actions of the public prosecutor.

Now, the Germans have a special pain point on the political abuse of criminal prosecutions. So their system is especially robust at cutting the head of government out of the process. But most advanced democracies do make the prosecutions quite far away from the head of government. In Britain and Canada, Italy and France—I don’t know how all of these countries work, but in just about every case, there is little or no role for the prime minister or the head of government to influence the way the prosecution does its work.

Now, I don’t want to say that these systems are without flaw and without scandal. I mean, the Canadian example, which I know well—in 2019, there’s a huge scandal in Canada because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put pressure on his minister of justice to go easy on a company that had paid bribes in Libya to get contracts. This company was an important employer in Trudeau’s province of Quebec and had important connections to Trudeau’s Liberal Party. And he pressed the minister of justice to reduce the fine for the bribery scandal. But the minister of justice did say no, and the scandal did explode. And although Trudeau survived it, he was never quite the same after.

And there’s something a little different about a prime minister saying, Look—can we go easy on this big employer that also is giving some money to my political party? And the president saying to a prosecutor, That guy over there, I don’t like him. I want you to put him in prison. Go do it. There is some difference there. And that latter thing: That can really only happen in the United States, not in pure democracies. And this unique American politicization of prosecution raises powerful questions about what course the United States will take in the post-Trump era, if there is a post-Trump era.

Here’s how things work in the United States. The prosecutors are appointed by the president—U.S. attorneys, the federal prosecutors, there’s a whole state system—in the federal system. Federal prosecutors are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and they answer to the attorney general, who’s a member of the president’s Cabinet and often a political ally of the president.

This situation would strike most people in most other developed countries as highly anomalous. When the system was created in the 18th century, it didn’t seem so dangerous as it does now. In the early days of the American republic, the federal government had a very limited role in prosecuting crimes. And the U.S. attorneys were days’ travel away from the center of government in Washington, and the president wasn’t there all the time. They were mostly operating on their own initiative. But as the federal government grew, as the federal criminal code grew, as federal prosecutions multiplied, abuses really did happen. And they happened thicker and faster in the 20th century, and they culminated with a big explosion of abuse that we know collectively as the Watergate scandal.

During and after Watergate—really beginning with the New Deal, but especially after Watergate—the United States tried to come up with some workarounds to the problem of the influence of the president over the system of prosecutions. They developed norms of professionalism and independence in the Department of Justice, norms that the U.S. attorneys—although appointed by the president—weren’t supposed to answer to the president. Norms that the attorney general should try to keep a distance away from individual prosecutions, and norms that the president himself should never talk to anybody about the individual prosecutions that he wanted. But these norms were just practices. They weren’t written down in any kind of law. They were a habit.