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Feb. 14, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:38
Episode 415 Scott Adams: Omar Versus Trump, Manafort, Spartacus
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Time Text
What?
FEMA administrator resigns?
I'm just reading the news.
Hey, everybody. Come on in here.
Well, you seem to be in a good mood, and why shouldn't you be?
Well, it seems that, once again, I have started this Periscope incorrectly, which means we'll have a small number of people on here.
There's a There's a temporary bug in the system where if I have the guest mode turned on, it won't do an automatic notification to Twitter.
That is being worked on, I understand, so I will not make this mistake again in the future, I swear.
Would you like to join me for the simultaneous sip?
I know you would.
Let us grab our mugs, our cups, our thermoses, our steins, our chalices.
Fill them with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah. Hello, Amsterdam.
Thank you for joining us.
We have a worldwide crowd here, as usual.
So, what's happening?
Let's check a few things.
So I like to go to the CNN page first, because whatever the CNN homepage for news is kind of gives you an idea where the mainstream media is at, where their head's at.
And so we start with Groundhog Day.
You know the movie Groundhog Day, where the same day just keeps repeating over and over?
See if you can tell what day of the last two years this is.
Alright? Did this headline happen today or sometime in the last two years?
Manafort bombshell deepens mystery in Russia probe.
The Manafort bombshell?
And I'm thinking to myself, oh man, this is going to be good.
Let's read about the Manafort bombshell, because I haven't read that same headline 25 times.
All right, let's see how far in we can get before we get to the bombshell-y part.
And the latest debacle from Manafort, deepening the core intrigue.
Now you have my attention.
It's a bombshell, and it's deepening the core intrigue.
This is big. Underlying, okay, it's something underlying, the probe, and why have so many, wait, why have so many of President Trump's associates been caught lying about contacts?
I thought it was a story, but it turns out it's a question.
It's not so much a story as it is a question.
I'm not sure a question is a story.
All right, in a significant new twist, this is going to be big.
In the 2016 election saga, wait, we're still talking about 2016?
What year is this? 2019, I believe.
Okay. A judge ruled Wednesday that Trump's ex-campaign chairman intentionally lied to investigators, breaking a deal.
Now, I'm no news expert, but it seems to me that if you had a choice between two headlines, one of them is Manafort lied, and the other one, potentially, was Manafort told the truth.
Which one of those would have been news?
Huh? To me, it seems like Manafort lied is dog bites man.
That's what dogs do.
Sometimes they bite people.
Is it news? Well, I understand why it's news.
But the funny part is, Manafort lied.
That should stop being a headline at some point.
Should be, Manafort lied some more, Manafort continues to lie, Manafort always lies, and just be done with it.
Alright, so then there's some blah blah blah in the article, and they try to get me whipped up into a...
Frenzy, but I got bored before I got whipped up.
Because, I swear, I just feel like I've read the exact same story 15 times.
Now, I know it's the first time this story has come out, but why does it feel like the same damn story over and over and over again?
All right. Then we've got Jeffrey Toobin saying Manafort is doomed.
That feels fair to say.
All right, let's talk about some other things.
So I guess Amy Klobuchar has referred to the Green New Deal as, quote, aspirational.
Who's the first person who told you that the Green New Deal was aspirational?
This guy. Yeah, and so that gives them some wiggle room.
Because many of the Democratic presidential hopefuls have signed on to, I think all of them, have signed on to the Green New Deal.
And it made you wonder, how are they going to defend that thing?
And then, somebody called it aspirational.
And that gives everybody an out.
Because, you know, even I like it.
Even I like the Green New Deal for being aspirational.
As long as you admit that we have no idea how to get to free education, free healthcare, you know, universal healthcare, etc.
But if we could get there, if we could figure it out, I'd like to have all those things for the public.
We just don't know how.
Now, Cory Booker, Is finding that it's not going to be easy running for president and trying to get the nomination in the party of women.
As you know, the Democrats have sort of evolved their brand to be essentially the woman party.
I think the Republicans are still the men and women party, but the Democrats have really taken a stand that they're the woman party.
And Cory Booker running for president who has no chance, no chance of getting nominated because, I don't know if you've noticed, but he's not a woman.
And he was asked if he would nominate a woman and he gave one of the worst answers I've ever heard a politician give.
He actually said that he can't commit to choosing a woman as a vice president running mate, but that he would look to women first.
What? What's that mean?
What does it mean that he would look to women first?
Doesn't that mean that he's making a gender preference that is independent of qualifications?
And then he's also created a trap for himself.
What if he looks to women first, but then he decides to pick a man?
Would that mean that there are no women in the United States who could be a vice presidential candidate?
Well, I looked to women.
I talked to 150 million of them, but I couldn't find any.
Turns out there were no women who were qualified to be Cory Booker's vice president, according to a hypothetical future Cory Booker.
And I thought, that's just terrible politicking.
Because if you're a man and you're watching that, you just said to yourself, you're not going to look at men unless all of the women in the United States are unqualified?
I don't think I like that.
And yet, that's okay.
Somehow, that's okay.
That is so not okay.
It's completely not okay.
There was some answer he could have given that it should have sounded something like, well, obviously, I'm going to pick the most qualified person.
If I picked a woman, I think that would be great.
You know, maybe it's, you know, that'd be a step forward, but I'm going to look for the most qualified person.
So something like that would have been the better political answer.
Now, we notice that on the Fox News news page, they are fact-checking Kamala Harris for something she said about Trump's tax plan, raising taxes on the middle class And I guess the fact checkers are saying that's not the case.
Do you see Kamala Harris being fact checked on the CNN homepage?
Let me look. Nope.
So, let me ask you this.
Would it have been as clear to you, and I'm talking about you, the regular watchers of my Periscopes, would it have been as clear to you from the start that Kamala Harris is essentially the one who's been pre-selected and that the media has decided she's the candidate?
Would it have been as obvious before I told you how all this works?
Because I started pointing this out Six months ago.
And now that it's pointed out, of course you have to watch out for confirmation bias because once that seed is in your head, you can easily see things that aren't there because you have the idea in your head.
But I think I can support the idea that, objectively speaking, you will see her not get the same bad treatment as the other candidates.
And I think you're already seeing that.
She even lied about Tupac.
Yeah, you know, I'm not too worried about little stuff like that.
You know, I guess Kamala said she smoked a joint in college and back then she was listening to Tupac and who else.
But apparently they didn't even have albums out while she was in college.
That came later. But who cares?
You know, it might have been a fake memory.
She just conflated.
Some memories. Oh yeah, Tupac and Snoop.
But who cares? I don't think that's important.
Alright, now you've been prompting me to talk about this.
So, Representative Omar, who was being attacked for saying some things, allegedly anti-Semitic tropes.
Trope. And the...
Specifically, it was her tweet.
I guess she has a history of other comments which have been interpreted that way as well.
But the latest one was, it's all about the Benjamins.
Benjamins referring to money and referring to AIPAC Jewish lobby and indicating that they were influencing Congress with money.
Now, I don't think anybody doubts that lobbyists influence Congress.
I don't think the general concept that there are such things as lobbyists and they do influence things.
Nobody's really questioning that.
But she was called out for that.
And the way CNN covered it and the way Jake Tapper covered it was just mind-boggling.
Because President Trump called her out for her anti-Semitism, which caused Jake Tapper to call out the President for his past alleged anti-Semitism.
And here are the examples that Jake showed.
So you've heard what Omar did, essentially said a money-related thing about Israel and Which is an anti-Jewish trope.
And so Jake Tapper first showed the meme that happened, I guess, during the campaign.
In which there was a shape that was a star, the same shape as the Star of David, and in the background there was some money, and I forget what the message was, but that was less important.
And so that was the first example, that the President tweeted around a meme that somebody else made, and that there was a symbol on there that looked like the Star of David.
Now I ask you, is it likely...
That the president saw that meme and said, aha, there's that hidden, sort of hidden, because it wasn't meant to be a Star of David, but it was the same shape.
When I say it wasn't meant, I'm not reading any minds.
I'm saying that the design was not supposed to be an obvious Star of David, but it was the same shape.
It was a five-sided chart.
Now, it could be, and I think the story was that the original creator may have actually intended it to be a Star of David.
I'm not sure what the birth of that was.
But I feel like it's fairly obvious that the President didn't make that connection when he tweeted it.
When I saw it, I certainly didn't make the connection.
You know, the first time I... Is it a six-sided star?
Yeah, you're right. Six-sided star.
Excuse me on that.
So the six-sided star of David.
I don't think there's the slightest chance...
That the President was aware of that symbolism connection when he tweeted it.
And if you don't mention that, that there's no evidence he knew that that symbol was part of the meme, because I certainly didn't.
I mean, I would not have even thought of that.
I could have looked at that all day long and never made the connection.
So is it likely that the President made the connection and thought, aha, I think I will cleverly send around Some kind of anti-Jewish thing while he's campaigning with his Jewish daughter, his Jewish son-in-law, and his Jewish grandkids.
Is it likely that he did that intentionally?
The odds of that being an intentional act are vanishingly small.
And if you don't mention that and just show it as if it's obvious he meant it, that is very fake news.
It's mean-spirited fake news.
It's aggressively fake news.
It doesn't even feel accidental.
So that was his first evidence that the president's bad too, and you've got to keep this in context.
The second one was that Trump made some jokes about negotiating and about money when he gave a speech during the campaign to some Jewish organization.
I don't know who it was.
But then he shows the clip.
And the context of the clip is that that's what he does.
In other words, he was called what he does.
In other words, he was calling it a positive trait.
He was actually in person, looking them in the eye, and saying, you know, I have this trait, and then sort of with a smile on his face saying, yeah, you're all negotiators too, and they laugh.
They laugh. All right?
So he's talking to a group saying this, yeah, and it felt like he was playing with the stereotype.
It felt like he was saying it in a light-hearted way, yeah, you're all a bunch of negotiators and that's just like me.
That's what I'm doing with this deal.
I'm going to renegotiate it.
That's pretty different.
So some people are saying that I broke up, the connection broke on the last point.
So I'll just say that the Star of David meme he sent around, it's almost impossible to imagine that he understood that this was some kind of a secret anti-Jewish thing.
And if you don't mention that we don't have any evidence that he knew that that's what the meme was about, that's not an honest story.
Because it's assuming he had some thought in his head, which is not in evidence.
In fact, it's far more likely it wasn't the case.
And then the second thing was he gave the speech to the Jewish group in which he was comparing a trait of himself.
That he will negotiate a deal and he'll try to get the best deal.
And he was with a smile on his face, clearly joking, said the same about the people in person to their faces and they laughed because they recognized that it was sort of based on the stereotype and it was just sort of funny because he was talking about a positive trait.
And said he hasn't. He likes to renegotiate.
Now, is that using a stereotype?
Yes. Was it hateful?
The opposite.
The opposite is literally the opposite of hateful.
He was saying it's an endearing quality.
Of course he wasn't believing every person in the room has all these traits.
Because nobody would think that.
Nobody would look a room full of people and say, every person in this room...
Has that specific trait?
Nobody would believe that.
So it was so obviously a joke to people who got the joke and understood that it was sort of a kind-hearted locker room, if you will, kind of a jibe.
Even jibe is too strong.
It was just sort of a funny comment.
So to put that in the context of hate is really...
It's reversing what happened.
It's almost the opposite of what happened right in front of our eyes.
We got to watch the same clip.
And then the third one, and you know this is the reason I'm bringing it up, he showed the Charlottesville hoax, like it was news.
Again! The Charlottesville hoax, for those of you who don't know, is that when the President said there are fine people on both sides, CNN continues to report it as if he meant Both sides being Antifa on one side, and the white supremacists were literally marching and saying anti-Semitic things in their chanting.
Somebody saying, it's not a hoax.
Boy, it must be your first time on this periscope.
Obviously... And I think any reasonable person would know that when he said there were fine people on both sides, he was talking about of the statue issue, because that's what the protests were about.
It was a group of people who came to protest and counter-protest about the existence of Confederate statues.
So to say that there are fine people on both sides, It's a simple statement that there are fine people who like statues, those Confederate statues, and people who don't.
And they're fine people.
They just disagree on this issue.
Now, of course, CNN turned that into the President of the United States intentionally went on live television And through his love to white supremacists, we're marching against his daughter, against his own son-in-law,
that he obviously has a close relationship, Jared, and against his own grandchildren, and against Israel, who, and here's the fun part, somehow Israel hasn't noticed his alleged anti-Semitism that the CNN seems to think is obvious.
Israel didn't notice.
So none of it makes sense the way CNN has reported it.
And they continue to report it as if that's a fact, as if it doesn't need to be explained, as in some people took it this way.
Wouldn't that be the honest way to report it?
Because the honest way to report it is, some people thought when he said this, he was talking about the white supremacist.
Other people think that that's a ridiculous thought.
This would be the honest way to say it.
A lot of people thought that he was talking about the white supremacist, and that's the way it's been reported.
But a lot of other reasonable people said, obviously, it's not the white supremacist.
He's just saying two sides of the statue issue.
Because the other interpretation is just batshit crazy.
And to continue to lie about that, and I think it is a lie at this point.
I don't know how to... I don't really...
It's... Well, let me modify that a little.
You can't know what people are thinking.
So maybe people think that that's what really happened.
But they have been informed...
Let me say this with some authority.
They have heard the alternative theory.
The alternative theory is that he was talking about both sides of the statue issue.
That would be a completely normal thing to say for a president.
The other one would be ridiculous.
It would be insane to even imagine that he went on TV and threw in his lot with the white supremacist as a president of the United States and thought, that will go okay.
So the way CNN reports it is so absurd.
It's hard to come up with a theory of how they could do this repeatedly once they've been informed that they interpreted it wrong.
How do you keep doing it?
Either you're liars, Or you really, really believe it's true, despite, I would say, fairly obvious evidence to the contrary.
Scott, you shared this with Chris Hayes, and he still reports it as real.
Yeah, I don't think anything can shake them out of it.
And here's why. I think there are two pillars of the Trump hatred That if the folks with TDS lose them, they lose too much of their worldview.
The two pillars are that the Charlottesville hoax was real and that the Russia collusion was real.
Those are pretty much, you know, a lot of the hate of this president are concentrated on those two pillars and both of them are hoaxes.
And I would say fairly obvious hoaxes, wouldn't you say?
Now, there were a whole bunch of other things that people said about him, but those are sort of melted away.
He's not acting like a dictator.
He's not crazy.
He's not getting bad results on the economy.
He's not finding that other countries won't work with us.
None of that's happening. So there's just all these other things that...
We're set about this president, which are very clearly not the case now.
If you look at what people worried about, if you go back to 2016 and say, what are the people who are experiencing the hysteria, what were they worrying about?
Well, now you don't have to worry about if those things will happen, because you've got two years to look at, and you go, okay, nothing crazy happened.
At least crazy in the way that matters to anybody.
Other countries still work with us.
The economy is screaming.
We're probably safer than we've ever been, if you consider North Korea being nice, etc.
So all you have left, the only thing you have left to maintain your ego, and that's what it is at this point, for the anti-Trumpers, they've bet their entire ego On Trump being bad, in whatever ways bad means to them.
And if they lose the Charlottesville hoax, the whole racism thing is going to start to fall apart.
Because if you look at what he's done, from releasing Alice Johnson to working to improve things with prison reform, To having the best economy ever for the middle class and the lower middle class, these are all things that are just directly beneficial to the community that people said he was going to discriminate against.
And even if you look at the immigration question, before we became educated about border security, People just, you know, we're tribal and they just were on each other's sides.
But we've all been educated.
And that sort of changes how you see the border question.
You know, I think there's been enough education about a real need for border security to the point that even the Democrats have voted for it in the past.
Apparently they're supporting it at the moment.
So even right now, we're watching the Democrats agree with the president.
Now, they're disagreeing on dollar amount, but they now agree on principle.
Am I wrong about that?
The objection to the border fence or wall or whatever you want to call it, the objection was always on principle.
The objection was not really ever about money.
You fact-checked me on that, right?
But it wasn't really a budget problem because it was small compared to the whole budget.
So the moment that the Democrats...
Climb down from it's a moral objection and they climb down to, well, suppose the budget is smaller.
They've given away their entire principle.
They have completely abandoned their own argument that they have been hammering the president for three years.
For years they've been hammering this guy only to climb down in the face of actual negotiations and light being shined on by the public.
Because there's a real problem.
There's a real problem.
So I think the Charlottesville hoax and I think the Russia collusion are going to be so important for the mental health of the anti-Trumpers because if they lose those two things they have to admit That they've been wrong about the most important thing in their lives.
I'm talking about the people who are in the political domain and reporting on it.
That they would be wrong about the most important thing that they've believed since 2016.
People can't really do that.
The average normal mind cannot make that much of a transition and survive, right?
Somebody said they'll still bring up David Duke.
So David Duke has now...
Didn't he support Omar?
I believe David Duke has supported Keith Ellison and I think Omar.
So you even have David Duke supporting Democrats, which just totally ruins everything.
Because one of the biggest complaints about Trump was, hey, can you explain...
Why the racists seem to like Trump?
Is that just a coincidence?
Is it a coincidence? All the racists seem to support the same person.
Huh. And that was one of the biggest arguments against Trump.
And then we watch, and it turns out those racists, they like some Democrats.
They like themselves some Democrats.
That kind of ruins that whole thing.
Now, of course, if we were smart, we would have realized that the most common situation in the world is that people will like the same thing for different reasons.
Let me give you an example.
I have one in my hand. Have you ever seen one of these?
This is the Apple AirPods, the little earpieces that are wireless for the Apple.
Oops. Damn it.
Did I lose you? I hope I didn't lose you there because I accidentally activated my iPad with these.
But, here's my point.
If you asked five people what they like about these, you would get different answers.
Some people would say, I like How they feel in my ears because I don't like the over-ear kind.
Some people will say, oh, I hated the cables.
Some people will say, I like how convenient they are.
So if you just ask somebody just a simple question, they say, hey, Bob, why do you like this product?
And by the way, I'm going to tell you, this is frickin' great.
This is a great product.
That's just an aside.
I resisted getting these for a while.
I have to tell you this. If you watch my conversation with Naval, and if you haven't, you really need to see it.
It's pinned to my Twitter feed.
It's at the top. But if you watch that, you'll see how smart Naval is, and it'll just blow you away.
I've called him the smartest person I've ever met, and I'm sticking with that.
But I don't know when it was, but it was a while ago.
I was at his house, or at his place, and he recommended that everybody should have these.
And I remember thinking, well, Naval's actually the smartest person I know, and if he says I should have these, maybe I should, but then I... I didn't really feel the need, and a long time went by, and then I got them.
You know, I finally had a reason to guess them, and I tried them, and it took me about 10 seconds to say, damn it, he's right again!
He's right again! Smartest person I know.
Anyway, you should get these.
These are amazing. But you'll lose them.
If you get that product, you have to calculate 15 minutes a day for looking for them.
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