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June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
29:25
Episode 85 - The Party of Hate
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here. There's still enough room.
Let me move some things around.
Bring your chairs. Gather around.
By now, I'm sure you have your beverage.
And it's time.
You know what it's time for.
Hey Mark. It's time for...
The simultaneous sip.
It's the best sip of the day.
Here it comes. Yes, whoever said I need a haircut, you are right.
I might do that today.
Time to get that haircut.
So, I don't know if any of you saw this tweet exchange that I just got done with.
Let me call it up so I'm reading it correctly.
With Amy Siskind?
I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
But she does not like Donald Trump.
Let me tell you that.
And so Amy, she's a Blue Jack person, and she tweeted this morning...
People supporting Donald Trump.
Our country will rise from this and you will not be remembered kindly.
His more vocal and public figures will be judged.
Some as sycophants and others as traitors to our democracy.
Some are and many more will face trial and end up in prison.
Wow.
Wow.
And so I replied, which he did not take kindly.
Let me tell you this story before I tell you my reply.
So I started to do a reply mentioning the good things that President Trump has done.
And you've periscoped with me before.
You know I always mix up the name.
Is it Joe Jackson or Jack Johnson?
I always get those two confused.
And so I'm sitting there having my first cup of coffee and I'm thinking, Joe Jackson?
Jack Johnson? Johnson, John Joseph, Joe Jackson.
And I'm thinking to myself, I could look that up and not look like an idiot when I tweet.
And then I said, what if it's wrong?
Will I get more attention or less attention if I do it wrong?
So I had two options.
I could do it right, and nobody would notice, and it would just be a tweet.
Or I could do it wrong, not intentionally, but just because I didn't bother to look it up and I didn't care.
And if it's wrong, I'll get way more attention.
So I'm sitting there with my coffee this morning thinking, yeah, I could look this up and get it right.
Nah. So I went with Joe Jackson, who I believe is actually shoeless Joe Jackson from Field of Dreams, the movie.
A real person.
So here was my tweet back to Amy, who believes that anybody who supported Trump will be seen as a traitor, possibly go to jail.
I said, will you be seeking revenge for the strong economy, the peace with North Korea, the better trade deals, the prison reform, the pardon of Joe Jackson, or the crushing of ISIS? I apologize for all of that.
Well, that didn't go over well.
It triggered a whole hornet's nest of hate.
And I think there needs to be a name for this.
It's sort of something like a transition or a reversal.
There's some kind of scientific name that I can't come up with for this effect.
But if you were to say to an American public, hey, who's being nice lately?
And who's being horrible and evil and their language is divisive?
Well, there was a time when I would have said, you know, Trump is saying some pretty divisive stuff.
I still think he could do some good things for the country, but whew, that's some divisive language coming out of that man.
I sure hope he tones that down eventually.
And if you were to look at just, say, the last month, President Trump's rhetoric has gone from 10 to, and you probably didn't even notice, from a 10 to a 4, maybe?
If that, wouldn't you say, maybe I'm missing something, but in the past month, it seems to me that the president has been presidential.
The one thing they had to complain about was that they thought he said animal when he didn't about immigrants.
He was talking about MS-13.
Now, compare his rhetoric over the last month which has basically been downright polite.
I mean, you would almost classify it as polite and respectful for the past month.
I'm not talking about anything before that.
And then let me reread Amy Siskind, her tweet.
People supporting Donald Trump, our country will rise from this.
Rise from what?
All the good news?
And you will not be remembered kindly.
That sounds like a threat.
His more vocal and public figures, me, will be judged such as sycophants and others as traitors to our democracy.
Some are and many more will face trial and end up in prison.
That is very Hitler-like talk, am I wrong?
If you were to say to me, you know, if you remove the names and you just said, show me this tweet, And then show me literally anything that President Trump has said in the last 30 days.
I'm not counting before that.
I know that was pretty rough.
The last 30 days.
Find me anything that President Trump has said that is even in the same ballpark with the pure evil of this tweet.
So there's been a complete reversal where the people who hate This kind of thing, the kind of language in this tweet, they've become that.
So they've become the thing they hate.
Now that's, you know, I know...
I see in my Twitter feed a lot of people saying things like, oh, it's projection.
They're projecting.
And I'm no psychologist, but I'm pretty sure that...
I don't think projection is even a thing.
I'm not sure that's a real thing.
I think all it is is People feel the way they feel for the reasons that they feel that way.
I don't know that projection is real.
I think that we imagine people are projecting just because of the coincidence of sometimes I'm thinking something that I think you thought or that sort of thing.
But I think that's just coincidence.
I don't think projection is a real thing.
So then my tweet exchange got funnier.
And I think this might be my fault as well, but I'm not sure.
So in the comments to Amy's tweet, somebody mocked me for not understanding economics.
And then I replied to that commenter saying, just factually, that I have a degree in economics and an MBA with a concentration in finance.
And I said, and you?
Because it was some random guy questioning whether I knew economics.
I thought it was fair to ask which one of us has credentials.
Now, I either hit the wrong reply button or something, but I guess Amy used this guy and believed I was saying that to her.
And it turns out that her economic credentials are actually really good.
Ivy League school, relevant degrees, etc.
So, Then everybody said, aha, man, did she give you a slap down in the conversation I wasn't in?
Now, maybe I hit the wrong button.
I didn't have my coffee. So it might have looked like I was replying to her, but I was replying to the person who replied to me.
So now I'm losing a fight that I didn't know I was in.
Because I got slapped down hard for something I didn't even know was happening, because I was talking to somebody else at the time, or thought I was.
I must have hit the wrong button.
So, correct me if I'm wrong.
But I've never seen this level of hate.
Now here's a prediction that I made recently that is similar to one that I accurately made when President Trump won the election.
On election night, when it was clear that Trump had won, I got on Periscope and I warned the public that was watching me, don't gloat.
Because things are going to be tough for the losing side.
That psychologically, there was going to be this cognitive dissonance cluster bomb that would literally lead to mental health problems.
Because their world that they imagined was so wrong That it's actually a mental health challenge, because they can't integrate what they're seeing, and it's obviously true, with what they believe to be true, and they don't match. So that's where you get moral.
And so the level of anger that we're seeing is high, but here's the thing.
If North Korea agrees to denuclearize, and it looks like it's actually happening as opposed to promises they might pull back later, if it actually happens, and I predict it will, it's going to be really tough.
And I'm not joking at all here.
So the next stuff I say, you might think I'm just joking.
I'm not. This is a big problem.
The mental health of the anti-Trumpers is going to be in serious jeopardy.
You should expect insane levels of irrationality, explaining how it was really Obama who got this deal, etc.
And the level of hatred You're gonna get will be off the chart now the hatred will be in the category of how can you say that he helped all he did was threaten war and other people fix this North Korea problem you're gonna see that you're also gonna see yeah but what about what about the time he beat an old lady up in the White House and and killed her right in front of the press and you'll say Well,
nothing like that happened.
And they'll say, sure, nothing like that happened.
But what about the time he shot a guy on Fifth Avenue?
And I'll say, well, nothing like that happened.
So you're going to see a lot of hallucinating of just how bad things are in this country.
I know you think it's just mind-blowing.
Amy Siskine did apparently half the country.
They believe they're living in a country where most things are worse.
And the only thing that's worse is them.
I don't think Trump supporters got any worse.
Do you? Because one of the side benefits of being on the winning side is that you don't get as mean.
You just don't feel as angry because things are going your way.
So I think Trump supporters started out really no worse than anybody else in the world, but I think they got kinder.
Partly because their president is, you know, mellowing, at least in terms of his rhetoric.
This might be temporary, but certainly for the last 30 days, it's hard to argue that he hasn't toned it down to a more helpful kind of a tone, right?
But I'm watching good things happening on almost every metric.
And the big argument against the economic success is that this is just an extension of Obama's success and things are actually slowing down.
And I try to explain to people that when you go from, you know, a 1 to a 2, you've doubled.
You know, hey, it's a 100% gain.
But if you go from 2 to 3.5, that's way more than the one you went up to begin with, but it's not doubling.
So choose which one you want.
I choose to say, that's the best gain we've ever had.
We're at a new high. I'm pretty happy.
Other people say, well, last year we doubled, but this time we only went up by less.
Did I do my math backwards too?
Well, that would be even funnier.
All right. Oh yeah, I did my math backwards, but the point is the same.
He promised 4%.
Well, we might get that.
If there's no big hurricanes, we'll see.
Yeah, you get the idea.
So the funny thing is, since I did that literally exactly backwards, I should never tweet until I have all of my coffee.
But you're going to get the same kind of result because people are going to fixate on that now.
North Korea officials heading for the U.S. That should be good.
Mm-mm-mm-mm. Alright, I might reissue that tweet with the correction, now that everybody's had time to react.
I think I had 800 retweets in about a minute and a half.
Alright, so it seems that the attack from the left is going to start concentrating on things that can't be seen.
Because the things that can be seen and measured, the economy, ISIS, North Korea progress, taxes are lower, the things you can measure, with the exception maybe of the deficit, are doing well.
But there's this whole vague future, maybe something I suspect Trump did something with...
Trump did something that might be bad, something with his properties, something with internationals, where they got their money, money laundering. Here's the thing I wonder.
Could we really go this far without hearing something bad about the Trump Organization?
I mean, maybe.
But it seems to me that we're so deep into this that if there were something out there floating around, I feel like we would have heard about it by now.
maybe not we'll see.
Do you feel bad for the people who believe they're living in a country where everything's going wrong?
I don't know.
I'm actually feeling some empathy because you know I look at Well, here's sort of the persuasion filter on things.
The old way I used to look at things, if I saw a tweet like Amy Siskinds, I would have said, oh, she's just lying because she's supporting her side.
So forget about what she's saying.
It's blah, blah, blah. She's just supporting her side.
And she knows that she's lying.
That was my old view.
My old view is that she would be completely aware that what she's saying is a complete departure from every measurable observation that you can see.
But that's not the case.
She actually lives in that reality.
A reality where none of the good news is happening.
None of it. Literally.
Her world, nothing good is happening.
Now some people are saying that the economy in particular really was just an Obama continuation.
Obama set it up and now it's well.
Going great. I agree that Obama gave us a solid base, and he did guide us off the cliff.
When he took office, things were at the base.
So it's no surprise that people are saying he did a solid job.
I think he did. I think all the metrics were looking good.
But to say, then, that President Trump gets no credit It's a lot like saying that President Obama's progress can be attributed to George Washington.
Because where exactly do you stop the chain of cause and effect?
Could President Obama have had a good economy if George Washington had not won the revolution?
I don't think so.
Would we be in such good shape if Reagan hadn't done something in the 80s?
Where do you take this chain?
Basically, the American economy has had this almost unbroken upward trend Since George Washington.
Yeah, we had, you know, the world had a depression.
There was a blip. There was only a few years.
And we've had, you know, downturns, little blips that lasted several years.
But basically, we're on sort of a, you know, few hundred years of So, the argument that the last president was improving things, therefore all of the credit goes to the last president, where do you stop that chain of cause and effect?
You can go all the way to King George III, as somebody is saying here.
Man, King George III really helped with the economy.
I'm sick of the Trump lies narrative.
Isn't it weird that the president, that his critics would call him the biggest lying president of all time, a big old lying liar.
But is it not simultaneously true that That President Trump has kept more campaign promises than any president?
I don't know if you can measure that thing.
Maybe somebody's measured that sort of thing.
But would it be objectively true, and I don't know if this is true, but it feels like it might be, that if you were just to count, you know, just the raw number of promises, he has either accomplished them, Or, he is deep into them.
Or, it's very obvious he's fighting tooth and nail to get them.
So, for example, the wall is not successful.
But he's clearly putting the effort in.
Nobody's going to say, you sure lied about getting that wall.
You can watch the progress.
You can tell who's stopping it.
You can see what he's doing to make it happen.
You can see that he's not letting up.
So, That seems pretty honest to me.
That's what he said he'd do. I think the healthcare, in my own calculation, healthcare is not a success.
And I would give, actually, Obama more credit for healthcare than I would give Trump today.
But it's early in the administration.
I'm hoping that the Republicans can, you know, take their game up a notch on health care.
The world would be better off if they did.
And you know, if Amy Siskind had said, There's no progress on health care.
If she had said, why is weed illegal federally?
Why aren't we moving faster on prison reform?
Urban renewal is great, but where is it yet?
We're not seeing enough there.
Race relations are worse.
I don't know if that's true, but it feels like it might be.
If she had said those things, I would say, you know, That's true.
I'm not sure those are all the top priorities.
Health care certainly is. But, you know, North Korea is pretty big.
ISIS pretty big.
You know, no major terror attacks, you know, ISIS-wise in the Trump administration.
Is that true? Economy booming, you know, jobs good, wages up.
Yeah, I think they would be more...
I feel like I need to help them figure out what to criticize.
Because there are legitimate things.
That's my cat, in case you wondered what that gigantic tail was.
There are legitimate things that you could say, hey, this isn't as good.
Or this needs work.
I'm all in on that.
Don't tell them how to criticize the president.
Well, it looks like they're gonna go after some kind of a generic corruption attack, which could be good persuasion, but they're gonna suffer from lack of actual examples, I suspect. Elon Musk.
What was the question about Elon Musk?
All right.
Any other questions?
All right.
Read Amy's list.
Did she make a list?
Alright. Oh, Elon is calling out the fake news.
Yeah, I talked about Elon Musk.
He's getting into it with various folks.
I saw an article from some woman who made some terrible insulting tweet about Elon Musk.
And she was complaining because when she complained about Elon Musk, criticized him essentially on Twitter, She complained that all of the Musk bros, she called it, you know, all people who supported Musk came after her and called her the C-word and other bad names.
And I'm thinking to myself, and then she concluded that it's dangerous to criticize him.
And I'm thinking, first day on Twitter?
She just described every interaction in which somebody criticizes a prominent person.
Have you ever seen a situation where somebody as prominent as Elon Musk has been criticized and then didn't get major blowback from the other side?
That's what Twitter is!
Twitter is the place you go to insult people and then get your ass handed to you.
What did I do this morning?
I responded to Amy Siskind and what happened to her horde of trolls that came after me?
They were very cruel.
Now, I refer to them as fuel because they just sort of make me happy and they get me charged up and it makes my day better.
That's just me.
But if you think That the only people getting this treatment are, first of all, women.
And second of all, only if you insult Elon Musk, try insulting somebody else.
See what happens.
Troll horde every time.
Horde of trolls. It's pretty rare to see an exception to that.
What about the no free speech in Britain?
Can't talk about that. Your troll army is after me.
It's weird that anybody thinks that it's only the other side who gets bombarded with these trolls.
It's sort of a weird blindness.
Yeah, I got in trouble for not talking about that thing that's happening in the UK that I can't talk about.
So, Free who? I can't even see that name.
I can't talk about it.
All right.
So, The ban is lifted. Is that true?
I'll try to catch up on that story.
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