>>1870990I think a fair treatment is this: Sam Harris is best described as a mystic. He's a guy who went to school for neuroscience but has spent most of his life and career pursuing meditation, mindfulness and other kinds of mystical ideas, but with such a hard rationalist bend that he's never been taken in by spiritualism, the occult, or other kinds of supernatural stuff. He really came to prominence during the New Atheist movement in the 2000's when he made big splashes criticizing Islam. He's also written some anti-Christian books, but I think the anti-Islam books are really what made him stick out. He was rated as one of the "Four Horsemen" of the time.
I'd describe his politics as humanist technocrat. He's very much into hard rational thinking, defers quite a bit to experts, and holds the wellbeing of all humans as the highest value, which puts him mostly in the same vein as humanists and technocrats. Except that he holds right-wing ideas where they make sense to him: one modern example being BLM, where he's mostly opposed to the idea that racism is a big problem with police and arrests. Definitely the heart of a progressive, but too hard-nosed to swallow ALL of the agitprop.
