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June 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
17:54
Episode 78 - Scott and Dale Talk About CNN’s Worst Day Ever
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Time Text
Bum, bum, bum, bum.
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Where's Dale? Dale, get over here.
So, hey, Eric.
Welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams featuring No Coffee Today.
I've already had my coffee. Let's go on.
So, here's why it's a bad day to be CNN today.
The first piece of news, the big news, is that President Trump has canceled the North Korean summit.
Here's what's interesting about that.
The people who were on President Trump's side, his backers, Have been saying for a long time, hey, you gotta be tough with these North Koreans.
Gotta be willing to walk away from the table.
We expected it might happen.
In fact, we thought it would happen.
And then he walked away from the table.
Just about the perfect time to do it.
So Trump supporters saw his walking away from the table as good news, a positive thing.
Meanwhile, Trump's detractors were sure that North Korea was pulling a fast one, that they were flattering him and they were going to lead him on a little bit just to pull the football away as they have all in the past so many times.
And this dumb old Mr.
Trump He doesn't see it coming.
Oh my God, he's dumb.
He's so dumb. He just can't see what they're doing to him.
And then he canceled the summit, which is exactly what they wanted, because they didn't believe it was real.
So I don't know how often this can happen, but he managed with one act, canceling the summit, to please both his biggest critics and his biggest supporters.
Pretty good trick, right?
So, how does CNN and the traditional critics, how do they handle the fact that he just did exactly what they thought he should do?
And also, slightly different reasons, but pretty related, exactly what his proponents think he should do.
There's not much to complain about, right?
But he gets better.
In the same week that we saw some big progress with prison reform, which the people have been calling the president a racist forever say, oh, that's hard to be against, given that even Democrats like it.
Now, it's not passed.
I guess it went through the House with a big majority.
But we saw Van Johnson being part of that process.
We see that it's clearly, you know, it's a nice diverse group, exactly like you'd want.
They're working towards solutions that just make sense.
You know, they're not Democrat solutions.
They're not Republican solutions.
Prison reform.
Just makes sense.
And so he got that done.
And then you also saw information about urban renewal.
We haven't seen enough there, but the fact that it's in the news plays against this big old Trump racist guy.
And then we saw today President Trump approve the pardon, I believe it is, of Joe Jackson.
Jack Jackson? What's his name?
Let me look on the homepage of CNN because I'm sure that news is there.
Hmm. I don't see it.
Jack Johnson. Okay.
Yes. Jack Johnson.
Sorry. So an African American boxer who was accused of taking a white woman across state lines and went to prison for that.
He's long dead.
But this was apparently, I guess Sylvester Stallone was behind this, raising the idea.
And this is something that even President Obama didn't do.
And President Trump did it.
Now, how do you swing that?
So that the Jack Johnson thing looks like it's a racist thing.
How can you possibly twist this into a negative when it doesn't, when it's not?
Well, let me call in the expert, Dale.
What do you think about the pardoning of Jack Johnson?
Is there anything bad about that?
I'm glad you asked, because it's obvious.
It's pretty obvious.
You saw the way he signed the thing?
You saw the way he signed it?
Big letters? You know what that means.
Narcissist! Narcissist!
Narcissist! Thank you, Dale.
Also, shut up, Dale.
There's nothing to dislike about that.
Now, there's a slightly larger picture.
And you also saw that the Reuters poll had done a crossover.
The generic Republican now beats the generic Democrat in a poll.
Which I believe is probably deeply related to the Kanye and Candace effect.
More Candace, I think I would give her more credit for being the intellectual spark that caused all this.
There does seem to be a big movement, if it proves out with other polls, a big movement in which the African-American community is starting to like President Trump's Production for them.
Specifically, unemployment is good and, you know, the other things I mentioned are moving at least in the right direction.
But, here's what I think is the big, big picture.
Maybe a turning point.
I'm probably getting over my skis a little bit here because I tend to, I skew optimistic.
So I'm going to give you a piece of optimism that is not quite as certain.
But it seems to me that when we had this situation where the president called MS-13 animals, and the entire world watched as that was first taken out of context to paint him as a racist, And then slowly, because it had to, it just became obvious that's not what he was talking about, that he was talking about a gang.
I believe that's the first time that his critics, wait for it, saw behind the curtain.
Right? Because when the Charlottesville hoax happened, his critics bought into it completely.
The critics of President Trump literally believed he was talking about the actual white supremacists as good people.
Now, anybody who's listened to anything I've said or was not predisposed to think that knows that he was talking about both sides of the statue question.
Yes, there are good people who want the statues taken away.
He doesn't agree with them.
And there are good people who want to keep the statues, just for historical reasons, not because they're racist.
That's what the President said.
But who could hear that?
Well, only the people who already believed That's who he was, that he would not say that, such as me.
When he was asked later, can you explain these comments?
Are you saying white supremacists are good people?
He said clearly and unambiguously, no, I'm disavowing that group.
That's not what I was talking about.
So Charlottesville and many of the other things, such as calling Judge Curiel a Mexican and talking about rapists coming across the border, when his supporters hear those things, they say things like, well, he's not talking about every Mexican.
He's just saying there's too much crime coming.
That could not be more obvious.
But his haters can't hear that.
They just hear, he must think Mexicans are very rapey.
And when they hear them call Judge Curiel Mexican, his supporters hear Mexican heritage, obviously, and that is a legitimate question about bias in a legal context, which is what it was, because you always ask those questions in a legal context.
But when we got to this animals thing, this one, once it was put back in context...
It was a lot more obvious that the media had tried to screw him.
And I think that was the first time that even his critics could see it.
All those other things were sort of invisible and their confirmation bias and they just read them the way they read them.
But when it got to the animals part, that's the first time they could see both movies at the same time.
They could see why people said he wasn't saying animals, and they could see the people who thought that he was talking about them, and they could see why.
They saw it clearly for the first time.
So we could be on the edge of something big in terms of the way people are thinking about it.
Now, the reason I jumped on this periscope is I was watching Jake Tapper's show on CNN just a moment ago, and they were talking about this so-called Gang of Eight meeting in which the Democrats and the Republicans, mostly Republicans in this case, were going to be put in a room and they were going to look at some top secret information.
And they're going to get to the next level about what's happening with Russia and spies and you name it.
I don't even know what they expect to see in those secret documents.
But, I just saw your comment about Hawk Newsome.
I'm going to have him on the show again, on the Periscope again, and we'll talk about that.
So the criticism on CNN is that the Trump administration invited their lawyer, I forget his name, but it's the lawyer that is working on the Russian collusion stuff.
And you're not allowed to have a lawyer in a top-secret meeting, and normally you would not invite a lawyer.
It's very unusual. But here's the thing.
The lawyer wasn't there for the confidential stuff.
It was never planned that he would be there.
It was planned that he would make some statements, kind of frame things, and then leave, which is what he did.
So, yeah, it was a flood, not Seclo.
And yet, I watched, I don't know, minute after minute of criticism about the fact that something unusual had happened, which is the lawyer had been invited, even though nobody mentioned any reason why that's an actual problem.
That was the best they had today, was that a lawyer sat in a room.
Let me put this in context.
The biggest criticism of the president today is that the president's lawyer sat in a room That was the same room that later on, when he wasn't there, they would talk about confidential stuff.
That's it. Somebody just said, keep supporting Israel, Scott.
I don't even know if that's sarcasm.
So the interesting thing, oh yeah, and you also saw that Elon Musk is doing a little startup, we think he's serious, called Pravda, which is funny.
There would be sort of a Yelp for checking the credibility of journalists and news organizations.
Now apparently he's been such a victim of fake news, in his opinion, That he's sort of moving closer to the Trump supporting side of the world.
Because here's the thing about Elon Musk.
I don't care what criticisms you have about him.
I don't care what you think he did or didn't do, could have done, could have done better, what he did wrong.
I don't care about any of that stuff for this point.
Here's the point. He's really freaking smart.
Alright? Like really smart.
And he's engineering smart.
Meaning that he's not going to be as susceptible to bullshit.
He's going to say, well, is the economy going up or down?
So I think he's going to look at the details.
So while we would not expect Elon Musk to support any of the provocative things that President Trump says, I think it's a fact that he notices some things that are important heading in the right direction.
There's no way he could miss that.
Now, thinking of sarcasm, which I just mentioned a moment ago, I keep getting comments on Twitter and it's more in the last few weeks than any time I can remember in which people can't tell sarcasm from a real point and I'm not mocking those people because I can't tell anymore and I mean that completely seriously and it's not I'm not using hyperbole to make some bigger
point I can't tell anymore When people are joking.
Because things are so crazy and our worlds are still so separate that somebody could be mocking the other team by just mimicking their style.
And I'll look at it and I'll go, well, yeah, that's a ridiculous thing to say.
But I can't tell if you're mocking the ridiculous people or you're one of them.
I actually can't tell.
Some of you know I got busted for...
For forwarding some satire, some parody from Comey.
So it was satire about Comey.
So it was writing that somebody was doing it in a humorous sense as if he wrote it in his book.
And I couldn't tell the difference.
I really couldn't. That's why I forwarded it.
I thought it was, well, he probably did say this.
This sounds just like him.
And I recently did a few tweets in which I used sarcasm, and I got some replies that I couldn't tell if they could tell.
I don't know. All right.
Go on Howard Stern and duke it out?
I don't know why I would.
I'm just looking at your comments right now.
Somebody said that Trump and Musk are the same person with different hair.
I've called all the people who came out of the so-called...
Paypal Mafia.
I think either all of them or most of them are master persuaders because they can all operate on that same level and it's just a level above other entrepreneurs.
You see it fairly consistently.
You saw it with Reid Hoffman.
You see it with Elon Musk.
You see it with Peter Thiel.
All right. I think my afternoon periscopes get more attention, it might be, because more news has broken by then.
I'm going to get off now.
I've got some other things to do.
I just wanted to get on.
And if you have a chance today to check out CNN, it's going to be like a comedy channel all day long because they're going to be trying to criticize him for all the things that they agree with.
Pardoning Jackson, backing off on North Korea before we get played, prison reform, good economy, It's going to be tough.
Tough day for CNN. So make sure you enjoy some of that while it's fresh.
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