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Feb. 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:03
Episode 425 Scott Adams: The TDS WMD Heading Our Way, Smollet and Rats
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
As luck would have it, I'm Scott Adams, and I've got coffee.
If you're fast, you're nimble, and you're alert, you can join me for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your thermos, your cup, your chalice.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
and join me for the Simultaneous Sip.
Ah.
Well, I almost got kicked off of Twitter today and banned from the earth.
and Probably would have lost my career.
But I caught myself just in time.
And let me tell you the mistake I almost made.
Are you ready for this? So I didn't do this, but man, it's a good thing.
I caught myself.
Here's what I almost did today.
There's a story, a CNN story, about some small island in which a type of rat...
Was killed, I think, by rising sea levels.
And the headline is that it's the first mammal to become extinct from man-made climate change.
It's a rat.
And it died because the sea level is higher.
Man-made climate change.
Now here's where I almost got in trouble.
Jake Tapper tweeted that this morning.
And I saw that and I thought, I can make a funny joke about this.
And I thought, I'm going to tweet, I'll retweet this, and I'll make my own comment.
And I'll say, why does CNN always take sides with the rats?
Do you see why I would have lost my entire career if I did that?
Let me see if anybody can tell.
Now, I'm experienced in all things media, but I want to see if you could have seen this coming.
If I had tweeted that, it would have been the end of my career.
Can anybody tell me why?
It's not because it was Jake per se, although that's part of the story.
Does anybody want to have a guess?
Because I don't think any of you would have seen this.
I see some people laughing and...
Yeah, there we go. There we go.
Some people have the right answer.
Rats, historically, in the worst possible way, have been associated with anti-Semitism.
You know, the implication that the Jews are the rats, I guess, is the anti-Semitic element that historically has been sort of as bad as wearing blackface, right?
So it's one of the worst things you can do.
And I'm pretty sure Jake is Jewish, so it would have been the worst possible thing I could have done.
Because nobody would have believed that I was just making a joke about rats.
Because the context would have ended me.
So what I was really going for was...
CNN's guests, not Jake in particular, but CNN's guests are often asked, so why is it that the white supremacists keep taking sides with President Trump?
And so I thought it would be funny to say, well, why is it that CNN keeps taking sides with rats?
In this case, actual rats that died on an island.
And then I thought, I'll make you some kind of clapper joke.
It's like, yes, but clapper's still here.
And I thought, I can't win with this.
So I bailed out. So that's the joke that you didn't hear.
By the way, if you are tempted to retweet that joke, don't do it.
Don't do it. Now, I'm of the camp that says that free speech is great, and even if you don't intend it to mean that way, it can still be offensive.
We just don't need to live in a world where we're offending people for no reason.
So don't be offensive.
Don't make the mistake I almost made.
So that's a cautionary tale.
Let's talk about the TDS weapon of mass destruction that's heading our way.
You all know where I'm going with this, right?
So it looks like the Mueller report will only see whatever the new Attorney General Barr wants us to see.
Could that be any worse?
Could there be anything worse for the mental health of the country than to have a partial report?
There's literally nothing that could be worse.
On day one, if we'd known it was going to come to this...
And by the way, why did it take until now for all of us to understand that that report would not be public?
And that it's actually designed to be a not public report, and that the only person who ever could have reported was going to be the Attorney General, or at least that's who would decide what's reported.
How did we get all this way without knowing the fact That that report was never meant for public consumption.
How the hell did we get all this way and just find that out?
I mean, we should have had a little warning, right?
Seems like from the beginning people should have been, you know, warning us.
Okay, it might take a few years and at the end you're still not going to see the report.
So, what this has done And all of you are ahead of me.
You know that the people who believe the Russia collusion narrative are going to believe that it's really in the parts that were not reported.
You know that's going to happen, right?
And the cognitive dissonance is going to be triggered in a way that you haven't seen since the election itself.
So, you know, the election triggered massive cognitive dissonance.
But when the Mueller report comes out, and I'm pretty sure it's going to say the president was not guilty of collusion, or at least there's no evidence of it.
I'm pretty sure it's going to trigger a massive mental health problem.
And I don't mean that as a joke.
Let me be as clear as possible.
This is a legitimate emergency.
It is a mental health emergency.
And we can predict it.
You can see what's coming.
There's no doubt about it.
In this case, there's just no doubt about it.
This is going to be a mental health emergency.
Because a lot of people are going to be triggered into trying to explain why they believed something for two years that had no evidence.
And I was watching Aaron Burnett on CNN. On a clip, and she was explaining that it would be unfair to call the Mueller investigation a hoax because people who are not President Trump and are not guilty of collusion were found guilty of things and pleaded guilty and charged with things.
Now, does that make sense?
Just on its surface.
The probe was to discover collusion of the president, and they found a bunch of things unrelated to that.
And the president has said that the collusion investigation was a hoax and a witch hunt.
And Aaron Burnett argues that because other things happened that are not related to President Trump's alleged involvement in collusion with Russia, that those other things happened Prove that it wasn't a hoax and it wasn't a witch hunt.
And I say to myself, how does that even make sense to anybody?
There are lots of things you see in the news where you can say to yourself, okay, I can see why you would believe that.
You're getting a different news source.
I can see why you'd think that.
Or I can see how you'd come to that opinion.
But I don't see any logical connective tissue...
That says this isn't a witch hunt and isn't a hoax because the central part of it looks like it's going to be a big nothing.
And so I was watching, and I really shouldn't name names, but watching Erin Burnett try to sort of explain the CNN position, which I assume matches her own position, was painful.
In other words, her face seemed to be in pain Because it was so hard to say these words because they probably...
I don't want to read her mind, but just my observation is that her face showed great pain when she was making this case.
Here's some other stuff.
She also pointed out in the same argument that John Brennan had noted that That just because there might not be any evidence of Trump willingly colluding with Russia, that sometimes people can collude, or at least they can be unwilling puppets.
So that wouldn't be colluding.
But they could be unwilling puppets of Russia.
And so that's worth noting too.
And I'm thinking to myself, what is the standard for being an unwilling puppet?
How do you measure who's an unwilling puppet for Russia?
Let's say a space alien came down to Earth who was completely unbiased.
Just a space alien lands here and amazingly can speak English and understand our culture and can read the news, but they're totally unbiased because they've spent no time on Earth.
And they look at the evidence.
They watch CNN's coverage, which attacks this president all day long.
And then they watch President Trump's actions and words about Russia.
And they note that he says kind things about every, let's say, dictator, because that's his good persuasion technique.
He stays respectful to the person while going hard at the policies.
You see it in China. High respect for President Xi, but maximum pressure on the trade deals.
You saw it with North Korea.
Nice words about Kim while going hard on the negotiations.
We see it with Russia.
Nice words about Putin while going hard at Russia on a whole variety of things.
So the alien would say, oh, I see the pattern.
He always says nice things about the leaders, but then what he does policy-wise is pretty tough.
And he goes, okay, I conclude...
That this person, this President Trump person, is not an asset for Russia.
He just always talks nice and then acts hard.
That's just his pattern.
And, by the way, it makes perfect sense.
It is the reason North Korea negotiations are going well.
It is the reason we'll probably get a good outcome with China without becoming lifelong enemies.
It is the reason that if we make any progress with Putin, and I wouldn't say that we have, It will be because he is maintaining this duality of treating the leader with respect while going hard at the policies.
It's a good strategy.
But then let's say the space alien who is unbiased looks at CNN's coverage and they see that they're attacking the president and all of his people non-stop every day for years.
And who else We'd like to attack the United States and have a bad outcome and lower the morale and the good feelings in this country.
Who else would want to do that?
Putin? Putin, right?
At least we think so.
I mean, I haven't talked to him, but that's the word on Putin.
So wouldn't the space alien determine that CNN was an unwitting asset for Russia?
Now I say that with all seriousness.
I'm not making a clever, humorous point.
I'm saying that if a space alien went down and analyzed it objectively and compared Trump to CNN, it wouldn't even be close.
The alien would conclude that CNN was a Russian asset, if it assumed that one of them was, if it started with that assumption.
That's highly hypothetical, so it doesn't persuade you, but I just felt like making that point.
All right. Now, CNN is also talking about today a witness, some American business person who has Russian connections and also hosted Trump when he was a private citizen a few decades ago when he visited Russia.
And there's a suspicion that maybe this Russian, this American who's in Russia, so we can't get to him, has the goods on Trump.
And I just looked at this story and I thought, this feels so desperate.
Do you know what the evidence is of what this American businessman who lives in Russia is?
Do you know what the evidence is that he has some kind of goods on Russia?
None. It's just somebody who knows Trump and knows Russians.
That's it. That's the evidence.
It's been reported as news as, but if, if we could get to this guy, we'd probably find out things that the Mueller investigation couldn't find out, and that's the only reason Mueller found nothing, because they couldn't get to this guy.
He's the one who has it all.
There's no evidence of that.
There's simply evidence that there's a guy they'd like to talk to.
That's it. All right.
Then there's also a story.
You can see that the anti-Trump media is trying to get rid of the Jussie Smollett story and trying to get rid of the Covington kids and these stories that are all bad for their narrative.
And so sure enough, like clockwork, how many of you knew That this week there would be stories about white supremacists trying to do dangerous stuff.
Didn't you know that was going to be a CNN story?
Sure enough, perfect timing.
There's a story about some National Guard crazy guy Who they're calling a white supremacist because they found an email that he had not sent, but he had composed to a white supremacist saying that the U.S. needs to be a white country because Europe is lost.
So that's what it said in the email.
Now, I'm not going to argue that he wasn't a white supremacist.
So I will accept The probability that if he wrote an email to a known neo-Nazi and if he said the things that are reported, well, that sounds pretty white supremacist to me.
So I accept that part.
But here's the thing.
Also in his emails, they got to see his motives and his plans for all the weapons he had acquired.
And he said he wanted to kill everyone on Earth.
And on his list were Chuck Schumer and other white people.
Now, let's say he's a white supremacist, and the evidence seems, you know, if it's confirmed, of course, the first 48 hours of every story, you should assume that everything could change.
But if it's confirmed that he's a white supremacist, it's probably also going to be confirmed that that's not the motivation for killing all the white people in the country.
Or no, all the white people in the world.
Because he wanted to do that.
He'd be a very bad white supremacist if he wanted to kill all the white people.
Well, he did say he wanted to kill all...
Somebody's saying Chuck Schumer isn't white because he's Jewish.
I don't accept that interpretation.
But in any event, he did say that he wanted to kill all the people in the world, and of course, many of them would be white.
He did not say, I want to kill all the people who are not white.
So, here's where I'm going with this.
He is a white supremacist, probably, assuming that gets confirmed.
And he did want to do some terribly bad things.
But they're not exactly connected.
So far, we've seen no evidence that the wanting to kill all the people in the world was necessarily related to him being a white supremacist.
But it's the best they could come up with.
What they really needed was a clean story of a real white supremacist killing non-white people, or attempting to.
That was the story that they really needed.
But they couldn't get that one.
And, you know, time was critical.
So they got one that was, well, at least he's a white supremacist.
We don't know what he was going to do with the guns, but we don't like it.
And by the way, I'm not defending the white supremacist.
So if anybody, if it sounds like that, just understand that.
All right. I'm expecting an enormous TDS problem when the Mueller report drops.
And I'm going to suggest...
A solution that I don't think will be used, but it will teach you something about persuasion.
So this is a non-practical suggestion that would teach you something about persuasion and also would deal directly with the TDS that's about to happen.
And it's going to be dangerous. I'm not kidding.
There's no hyperbole here.
The mental health of the country is really going to be challenged fairly soon with this Mueller report.
And here's the suggestion.
Now remember, this is not a practical suggestion.
It's just something that could be done.
It would be easy to do, so implementation would be simple.
And it would directly deal with TDS. And you're going to freaking hate it.
You're gonna frickin' hate this suggestion.
You ready? The president cannot pardon Jussie Smollett because it's a state crime, not a federal crime.
But the president does represent a body of people, not just the country, but more, you know, in political terms, his base.
And this crime that Smollett committed against, let's say, in a sense it was against the police, but it was largely a crime against Trump supporters.
It was a hate crime against Trump supporters.
The best persuasion move that the president could make to get ahead of the Mueller TDS that's coming, which is a real, real problem, is to say publicly that he recommends the governor pardon Smollett
and that we should use it as a lesson for, wait for the good part, wait for the good part, a lesson on the brainwashing, I wouldn't use that word, but the persuasion coming from the anti-Trump but the persuasion coming from the anti-Trump world.
Let me ask you this.
Do you believe that Jussie Smollett came to his current opinions independently?
Do you believe that he looked at objective information, looked at both sides of all the arguments, and decided that things were so bad in the country, and especially that President Trump was such a problem and Trump's supporters were such a problem,
that he risked his career, and it was a big risk, I'm sure he knew it was a risk, that he risked his career To try to solve what he saw, here I'm getting ahead of myself because maybe he's just crazy, but let's assume that when the police interview him, he says, alright, you know, and I think he's still maintaining his innocence.
So let's imagine This is speculative.
Let's imagine that we find out that he's definitely guilty.
He decides to confess and he says, look, I'm going to be honest.
I thought the country was at risk and this was my way of ensuring he didn't get re-elected.
It was a thing I could do.
I was acting like a patriot to protect the country.
You know what? If he said that, I would believe it.
Because, as I've been telling you for the last several years, people do not come up with their own political opinions.
They are assigned their opinions by the media that they choose to consume.
People are assigned opinions.
They are, quite literally, brainwashed.
Both sides. It's not just CNN watchers.
It's just whatever you watch, whatever you consume, if you don't look at both sides, you're definitely being brainwashed.
There's no doubt about it. And I mean that literally.
You are being mentally rewired to become a different person and to have different views.
Can CNN, MSNBC, and the anti-Trump media do something that powerful?
Yes, it's obvious.
All you have to do is look at half of Hollywood and you can see that they are literally experiencing mental derangement and a true belief that they're living in a country with a dictator.
They actually believe it.
Despite any evidence to the contrary, they believe this to be true.
So, in my opinion, President Trump could, and I'm not predicting he'll do this, so don't worry about it happening, right?
So those of you who are objecting to this, you don't really have to because it's not going to happen.
The President could reframe the situation in the whole country so that people understand that the enemy of the people, the media, are the people who victimized Jussie Smollett.
Boom! Jussie Smollett, if he was acting in his mind as a patriot, is the victim.
Now that doesn't excuse the fact that he broke laws.
It doesn't excuse the fact that he targeted a group in the country.
Everything he did is bad, and that's the reason there are laws about that kind of stuff.
So the law is quite clear, and if he did what we imagine he did and what it's alleged that he did, there's a reason that there's jail time involved with that.
I mean, those are serious things.
But that's also...
Why people get pardons as opposed to getting released from, you know, in a jury trial.
The pardon is for people who are guilty.
Pardons are not for people who are not guilty.
Pardons are for people who did some bad stuff.
But there is some extenuating circumstance.
Maybe they've been in jail too long.
You know, lots of different reasons.
So, President Trump could, and this is just a persuasion lesson, I'm not recommending it, not saying it's going to happen, could write an open letter.
He could say, this looks like a case of the media brainwashing Jussie Smollett to violence.
I recommend that not only does the governor pardon him, But that he come to the White House and see if we can work with him to make the world a better place.
Maybe there's something of interest that he could be involved with.
Now, but he's not asking for forgiveness.
It's not really a forgiveness play.
Forgiveness is not the play here.
Let me tell you my own view of this.
Like most of you, when I heard that Jussie Smollett's story fell apart and that he might have legal jeopardy, I felt that, you know the word schadenfreude?
Another German word because we don't have a good word for it in English.
But schadenfreude means the enjoyment of bad things happening to other people.
And I felt that.
I literally felt happiness That something bad was going to happen to Jussie Smollett.
And as that sort of corrosive feeling sunk in, I started feeling ashamed of myself.
Because I don't want to live in that world.
I don't want to live in a world where Jussie Smollett can be a victim of CNN And then I could be happy that something bad happens to him.
Now, I understand he was trying to do something bad to Trump supporters, and that would include me in a general sense, but I can't feel good about this.
I felt good when I first heard the news, but as it sinks in a little bit, unless there's something about this story that comes out that's new, and it could be, you know, if it comes out that he has, let's say, mental health issues, Well, then I also feel sorry for him.
You still have to do what the law requires you to do.
Maybe there's no forgiveness that works in a functional sense.
But I can't hate him.
Because whatever the hell he did, or whatever reason he did it, assuming he's not literally mentally insane, he probably did it in good conscience.
Meaning that he believed the CNNs and MSNBCs and the New York Times and the Washington Post that he believed their version of reality.
And he was acting like a patriot to do what he could to get rid of this Trump dictator and cause some pain to the Nazis in his opinion.
So Imagine how wildly reframed things would look if President Trump recommended to the governor that they go easy on him.
Now, in this case, President Trump would be talking as the aggrieved party.
In other words, he's the victim.
President Trump is the victim of the crime.
You could say that using the police resources creates other victims as well, and that's important.
But he does represent The group and the entity, the people that support him, he does represent us in some sense.
And if he said, look, I would prefer that we understand what happened instead of just punishing.
I'd prefer we understand how we got to this point.
And we'd like to bring him to the White House, talk to him, Find out what happened and understand that we're living in two different movies and he may have been lost in one of the movies and that we have to do a better job of being objective about the news.
Now, can you feel the reframe there?
Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking.
You're thinking that you just need that revenge.
You just need that dopamine hit from your schadenfreude.
You just can't let these lefties get away with it.
If this were a conservative, nobody would talk about pardoning or nobody would talk about going easy at a conservative.
Right? Is that what you're thinking?
You're thinking, that's not fair.
Why should we go easy on the people who are enemies?
They would never go easy on us.
It's about strategy.
If you go hard at your enemies, they'll go hard at you, and that's it forever.
If you wish yourself into a tit-for-tat situation, well, that's what you'll get.
But, for the price, Of one person who you think should go to jail, and you're really mad, for the price of that one person maybe not going to jail, You could change the entire way that the country looks at its situation.
You could reframe the entire way we understand the story to take the guilt away from the brainwashed person and put it where it belongs.
And this is not a stretch of the imagination.
The blame squarely belongs With the fake news, enemy of the people groups.
Now what's different about today compared to even, let's say 20 years ago, is that the ability of the press to tweak your emotional centers and cause you to act is better than it's ever been.
So while I don't think the press could have brainwashed people too effectively in the 60s, In 2019, they can brainwash.
They can absolutely make you believe things that are ridiculous.
And you see it all the time, right?
Plenty of examples. So, you got really quiet.
I was watching the comments, and you got really quiet.
Now, nobody says he's not a criminal.
Nobody says these crimes are trivial.
Nobody says that people should be, let's say, unaffected by the legal system.
Nobody thinks that he should be above the legal system.
But for strategy purposes, yes, somebody used the word here, as a strategy, sometimes you have to give up a pawn.
So, Smollett is a pawn in the larger game of chess, which is the country.
And if the president decided to trade a pawn for reframing the entire issue to support his story that the enemy of the people, the press, are so bad that they weaponize this guy into doing this, which is exactly what happened in my opinion until new information changes my mind, which it might.
Yeah, we have to wait and see what the legal system comes up with Somebody says, you tried the high ground with Hawk Newsome and you failed.
Well, here's the thing.
Hawk... He has always needed to, let's say, be compatible with his base.
In other words, he needs to pace them and agree with them, or else he can't be a leader.
You can't be a leader if your base is on such a different page that you can't even get them to listen to you.
So his problem was that getting even a little bit friendly with the people they imagine are the enemy just didn't work.
My problem with Hawke is not Hawke.
It's not about him as a person, because I actually think he has good intentions.
It's just that he's in a situation in which he couldn't...
Given that he's representing, you could argue, the most radical anti-Trump view, it was just too much of a gap to try to find a way to work together.
His side would not allow that.
And... And he got a little more provocative than I could handle because I couldn't work with him if he stayed as provocative, racially provocative, as he did.
So it's not personal.
My disagreement with Hawk is not personal.
It is entirely based on the two things just were not compatible as a way to move forward.
I couldn't be part of that. All right.
He is an adult and needs to be held accountable.
And none of that has anything to do with my point.
So here are the things that don't address my point.
He's guilty. He did a bad thing.
The law must treat everybody equal.
He's an adult, so he must take responsibility.
Those are all true things, but they don't address my point.
Because the whole point of a pardon is that you're dealing with guilty people.
They are guilty. You don't talk about a pardon, typically, for someone who is innocent.
That's a different process.
Somebody says he's complicit in the brainwashing.
He's not a victim of it.
Well, let me ask you this.
Here's a mental experiment.
Imagine if there were no biased news sources.
Imagine that the news were reported just facts, and if the news didn't know a fact, It wouldn't report it.
And if it didn't have two sources that they could name, they wouldn't report it.
So imagine a world where only facts are reported.
Would Jussie Smollett have felt the way he felt about President Trump and his supporters?
Not a chance. There's not a chance that any citizen is making their own decisions.
They're not. They're being assigned opinions.
Now I have a theory.
That the reason that the Hollywood types and artists and creative types are more susceptible is that they think in terms of stories.
If you're an actor, if you're in Hollywood, your brain is optimized for narrative and stories.
If you're, say, an engineer, you're a scientist, you're a business person, your brain is optimized to look past bias.
That's what those professions do.
They teach you the skill of looking past bias.
So it should not be a surprise that the people who are most torqued up, the people who are angry to the point of Acting insane, or doing things that look insane, it's not a surprise that there's a certain segment of the population who's more susceptible to that, because they don't have the background and training to recognize bias and to maybe see around it a little bit.
You haven't given one example where the media acknowledged a positive Trump move.
Were we even talking about that?
Stunt was organized because he was dissatisfied with his salary.
Well, that would be interesting.
So if it turns out that this had nothing to do with politics, and maybe that will happen.
If it turns out that he doesn't believe, that Trump is a monster and he only did it for his salary, well then I say you have to go to jail.
That's really the end of the story.
So we're going to find out more and it might turn out that the approach that I suggested might not fit the facts when we learn them.
But it could be a combination.
It could be that he did it to get his salary increased But it could be that at the same time he believed that Trump was a monster and that he was just attacking a monster and there's nothing wrong with that.
That too would have been a brainwashing situation.
All right.
You're assuming his mental state in this whole scenario.
No, I'm not.
I'll say it slower.
We don't know his mental state.
If it turns out, as I just said, that he has mental problems, that means one thing.
If it turns out he was doing it just for career reasons, that means another thing.
We don't know, and when we do know, we'll know what to do.
So I was talking in the speculative form, which I clearly labeled.
Which is that if it's exactly what it looks like, sort of an anti-Trump political act, that may have had some impact on his salary, you thought.
But if it was a political act, then you go one direction.
Sorry I've got a touch of the flu.
Not a touch, I've got quite a bit of flu.
So if I said anything crazy today, I blame the flu.
And that's my excuse.
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