June 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
18:06
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| Hey everybody! | |
| I hope you're having a good Memorial Day and remembering the fallen. | |
| So as we pay tribute to the heroes that died defending the country today, let us lift a mug. | |
| Let us have a simultaneous sip to the veterans and the active soldiers and those who have fallen. | |
| Happy Memorial Day. | |
| So, I saw that the Democrats have strategized on a brand new attack on President I saw that the Democrats have strategized on a brand new And unlike the vast majority of their other attacks on President Trump, | |
| This one is pretty, pretty good, if I may borrow a phrase from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David. | |
| And apparently what they're deciding to do is collapse all of their complaints about the president into the word corruption. | |
| Hold on. Hello. | |
| Darn, I thought I was going to be a telemarketer. | |
| All right, so the Democrats, according to a news report in New Yorker magazine or someplace, have decided that corruption will be their organizing theme for attacking the president. | |
| Now, the first time, you know, the moment I saw that, I said to myself, I said to myself, that's a pretty strong attack. | |
| And here's why it's good. | |
| Because it plays into people's preconceived ideas. | |
| So people who are already anti-Trump, they already believe he's corrupt. | |
| So it works on that level. | |
| But it also works to update all of the stuff that didn't work. | |
| So their Hitler attack didn't work, the incompetence didn't work, the he's crazy didn't work. | |
| I think they tried a few others, but all of those approaches didn't work. | |
| And part of the problem was that the news kept serving up counterpoints. | |
| So, hey, he's a darn racist. | |
| Who is signing a pardon for an African-American boxer who was wrongly accused? | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| So it doesn't take too many points of counter evidence to destroy something. | |
| Now, what is different from that is take a look at, say, Crooked Hillary. | |
| You can call somebody crooked and they can't, here's the key, they can't disprove it by doing something else that is honest. | |
| You see how powerful this is? | |
| You can disprove, I mean, in a sense, in a persuasion sense, you can disprove, not in any legal sense, but you can disprove a charge of racism simply by doing a bunch of stuff that no racist would ever do. | |
| We saw him loving on a 90-year-old African-American woman at a police event. | |
| It's just something racists just don't do. | |
| Now, even if you say, oh, he was acting or whatever, the greater point is that racism is the kind of attack that you can pretty much dispense with with a little bit of effort. | |
| But if somebody says you're crooked, Or somebody says you're corrupt. | |
| There's no amount of examples of not being crooked and not being corrupt that have anything to do with the claim. | |
| Right? So it's much more robust that way. | |
| You can't disprove a suspicion. | |
| Beyond that, President Trump has a problem that he has a massive business enterprise that covers the globe. | |
| And you know, you know, That people in those other countries are going to act a little bit extra friendly toward a business associated with the President of the United States. | |
| There isn't really any way to turn that off. | |
| You can't really tell the Trump company to not take a good deal that's both legal and above board Just because you think it might be a better deal than you could have gotten if you did not have the Trump name. | |
| It's a real tricky territory because it's entirely likely that the Trump Organization is getting better deals, better offers, maybe a little better terms, but you can't really tell If there's a law broken, and even the people in the Trump Organization aren't necessarily going to know. | |
| I mean, what are you supposed to do if somebody offers you a good and legal deal? | |
| Are you going to say, you know, hypothetically, I don't believe I would have gotten that deal if we didn't have a President Trump. | |
| There just isn't any way to know. | |
| And if you have a responsibility to your company, your employees, to take good deals when they're offered, what the hell do you do? | |
| I mean, you can put some transparency into the system, but even that doesn't help. | |
| Because if you said, well, just for example, if you said, well, we accepted a deal under these terms from a, let's say, a Middle Eastern country. | |
| You know, we're telling everybody, right? | |
| There's nothing secret. They offered us a loan. | |
| We took it. Here's the deal. | |
| What happens? People look at the deal and they say, oh, is it a coincidence that it's a Middle Eastern country who needs something? | |
| Well, here's the problem. | |
| 100% of the countries in the world need something from the United States. | |
| I don't know how you disentangle it. | |
| And I don't think there's a solution where you say, well, we can't have successful people as president. | |
| So that's what makes the corruption claim so diabolical. | |
| Because people are going to see it even when it isn't there. | |
| So you can count on the press to serve up infinite stories that fit the label because, let's face it, they're all sort of operating on a, if not colluding, | |
| and there does appear to be some collusion between the news and the Democrats, And to be fair, there's plenty of collusion between the Trump administration and Fox News, for example. | |
| So both sides act friendly with the media that supports them. | |
| No surprise there. | |
| So since you have a massive media that is likely to feed confirmation bias into that corruption label, it's super powerful and I wouldn't be surprised if a professional is behind it. | |
| And by professional, I don't mean professional advisor or professional politician. | |
| I mean a cognitive science. | |
| It is Godzilla quality, even if he wasn't directly involved. | |
| I'm not speculating that Robert Cialdini is behind that decision to use corruption as their organizing principle, but it is the quality that you would expect from somebody at his level of understanding. | |
| Now, some people said, eh, but it's boring. | |
| You know, it's not like a low-energy jab or something like that. | |
| But it's interesting enough in the way that dark, that word that everybody used around the election time, those who wanted to paint Trump with one organizing word, they collapsed it into the word dark and it was very effective, very effective. It's not visual, as somebody said, yes. | |
| So let's talk about the weaknesses. | |
| So the weaknesses are, as you mentioned, it's not visual, but there will probably be plenty of stories with people who are visual. | |
| So, for example, if the news decides, oh, this Michael Cohen lawyer's got something hinky going on, you're going to see infinite pictures of him. | |
| So he's visual. | |
| And you might, for example, find out that somebody had coffee with an oligarch. | |
| Well, the oligarch is visual. | |
| So there may be some visuals that can tie to it, but you're right. | |
| The concept of corrupt and the concept of crooked, for example. | |
| Well, crooked, you could imagine that Hillary's standing crooked, so that one's sort of a hybrid. | |
| So that's one weakness. | |
| It's a little harder to get the visual, but I would not count on them not being able to do it. | |
| They really just need one good photo of something and they got their picture. | |
| And that one good photo could be a meeting of people who shouldn't be in the same room, even if it's taken out of context. | |
| The other weakness with the corruption claim is, and here's the biggest one. | |
| Do you remember when fake news was a criticism that was used against President Trump? | |
| Do you remember way back when, when fake news was what they said about the media supporting Trump? | |
| You almost can't remember that that was where it came from, right? | |
| President Trump did not invent fake news. | |
| He didn't invent it. | |
| So they had this figurative speaking. | |
| They had a gun pointed at his head that said fake news. | |
| He grabbed it out of the hands, turned it around and said, I got your fake news right here. | |
| And the reason he could do that is that he's the better brander. | |
| He is the more interesting character. | |
| He's the one everybody's going to quote. | |
| And let's face it, Republicans and Trump supporters are just way better organized. | |
| So whatever message the president gets behind, the forces get behind pretty quickly as well. | |
| And it becomes a force multiplier and it became insanely effective. | |
| I mean, the fake news label is one of the biggest stories of the last several years. | |
| Now, corruption has that same weakness that the president, should he decide to take this approach, could flip that because there are so many examples that could be used on the Democratic side. | |
| There will always be plenty of examples of it on the other side. | |
| And I wouldn't go into a boxing match against a professional boxer if you're not one. | |
| So if they're going into a branding contest against the best brander in the world, it's going to take about a minute and a half for him to grab the gun out of their hands and shoot them in the head with it. | |
| Now that doesn't guarantee it can happen, but at least they're making a, for the first time, Actually, I've seen two things come out of the Democratic side that I would consider good work. | |
| Good work in terms of persuasion and supporting their team. | |
| The other was, I think yesterday I retweeted Kamala Harris. | |
| Who was saying that we should get out of the business of making weed illegal. | |
| I'm paraphrasing. That wasn't exactly what she said. | |
| But that's the sort of issue that is just a layup. | |
| Republicans are big on states' rights, and now we have plenty of data from states. | |
| States can decide. | |
| It would be really easy for Republicans to say, alright, we've seen enough. | |
| Let's toss it over to the states. | |
| We stay consistent with our Republican philosophy. | |
| Let the states do what states do. | |
| Just get out of that business. | |
| Trump could do it in five minutes. | |
| Five minutes and he could be done with it. | |
| He just has to pick up the phone and say, hey, just get us out of this business. | |
| Do what you do. Get us out of this business. | |
| But if the Republicans don't, if the administration doesn't do that, they've just given a layup to the other team. | |
| And I don't know why... | |
| Now, your first reaction would be, well, it's obvious. | |
| Why? Because there are enough people on the Republican side who would object to it that it would be problematic. | |
| It's not as easy as you say, Scott. | |
| I reject that. | |
| I believe that the right would complain about it. | |
| Those few who would complain, I don't know what the percentages are, maybe 30%. | |
| I don't know the numbers. | |
| But they will complain this much. | |
| Will anybody on the Republican side or the conservative side change their vote because the president favored states' rights for something which we now have a lot of data for? | |
| Nope. It's a layup. | |
| You would have a week of news where people chattered about it and some Republicans would say, I don't like that, and they would not change their votes. | |
| Because it just isn't that important in the larger scheme of things. | |
| But it is important to get rid of it. | |
| So getting rid of it is a big upside politically. | |
| It's a big upside for people. | |
| It's positive for the African-American community and for minorities in general who are harder hit by the current laws. | |
| It's just a layup. | |
| And why a President Trump would let the other team have such a free shot when it's so easy to make it go away. | |
| You just have to front run it because the Republicans are in power. | |
| You've got between now and the midterms. | |
| Just take it off the table. | |
| So there may be reasons that I'm not aware of, arguments I've never heard for why President Trump is not getting out in front on this. | |
| It could be just it's not priorities. | |
| It could be there are some other factors I'm not aware of. | |
| But I don't know what they are. | |
| As I said, I'm not aware of them. | |
| So let's say that's currently a mystery to me. | |
| But until the mystery is explained, I'm going to put that as an error. | |
| So for those of you who blame me for saying that everything the Trump administration does is awesome and excellent and smart and genius and master persuader, here's a very clear example where I would call that an error. | |
| I'm open to changing that opinion if I learn some new information, but it looks like an error. | |
| Now, if it happens over the summer, Can it? | |
| I'm not sure it can happen over the summer. | |
| But if it did, or at least happened before election for the midterms, then I would say, oh, that's actually pretty clever. | |
| They waited for the perfect timing. | |
| But I wouldn't be happy about that. | |
| Because that's how many months that people are suffering under their own law just to optimize the timing. | |
| I couldn't support that. | |
| So even if politically it was brilliant, even if persuasion-wise it was brilliant, this would be a clear case where I would not support it on ethical grounds. | |
| If it's right, it's right, and if it's right, you do it now. | |
| You don't wait until your optimal political time, and it wouldn't be that much difference. | |
| Suffering in the sense that if there's anybody who's going to jail because of the current laws, it would be better to fix that now than later. |
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