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Feb. 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:41
Episode 431 Scott Adams: Update on War With the Enemy of the People
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here. Gather around.
Grab your mug.
Grab your chalice, your stein.
Grab your glass.
Grab your thermos.
Because you know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
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For those of you who are nimble of finger and ready for this, raise your chalice and join me for the simultaneous step.
Ah, good stuff.
Good stuff.
So I note that there's a group of child protesters who are protesting.
I guess they're going to Mitch McConnell's office and protesting.
And you know that they already protested with Dianne Feinstein.
That didn't work out so well for them.
And so the question I ask myself is, have the Democrats decided...
To use children to make their argument.
Now, I don't want to make the obvious joke that AOC is 29 and she's kind of young, and that might explain a lot, but it does strike me as curious that the Democrats are literally sending children to make their arguments.
Children! They can't make their arguments with adults.
Do you really need children?
Now, there was a hilarious, but possibly shocking, poll that we just saw go around.
David Axelrod sent a poll around, and I tweeted it, in which the priorities of the country were ranked.
Of course, stuff with the economy and healthcare and stuff were up toward the top.
But way down at the bottom of the list of priorities, second from the bottom, Was climate change.
After all that's been said and done about climate change, it's at the very bottom of the list of priorities.
Now, I wouldn't make too much out of that, because it doesn't mean it's not a problem.
It just means people have ranked it low.
And that could be an artifact of the fact that half of the country thinks it's literally a nothing.
So if you took any of those items on the list that people say are a big problem and half of the country said, well, it doesn't even exist as a problem, it would rank at the bottom.
So, for example, if half of the country didn't care about the economy, Then no matter how much the other half cared about it, it would still be at the bottom.
Because half of the country doesn't care about it at all.
So, being at the bottom of the priorities is not an indication that the public doesn't care about it.
That's a false interpretation, in my opinion.
It's an indication that half of the country doesn't even think it exists as a problem.
And half of the country, and these are rough numbers, you know, maybe it's 30%, maybe it's 40%, maybe it's 50%.
And then another big chunk of the country thinks it's the worst problem in the world.
But since the poll question presumably did not capture the, let's say, the degree of caring, Meaning that if half the countries say it's irrelevant and half the countries say it's the biggest problem in the universe, it's still going to get rated as not much of a problem because half of the people said it wasn't anything.
So that was a little bit misleading poll, but interesting to see where it ranks.
All right. So we're watching CNN and the anti-Trumpers in general open what I call the portal to fake news hell.
And that's in the form of primarily Michael Cohen.
He's sort of the first demon out of the portal to fake news hell.
And they have to work hard To come up with something because the president's got such a strong hand this week.
First of all, whenever the president goes overseas, good things seem to happen.
At least in terms of the public's opinion of his competency and everything else.
So the fact that he's overseas at all is positive for the president because it always is.
The fact that China is starting to talk about meeting at Mar-a-Lago because everybody's expecting things to turn into an agreement is fantastically good for this president.
Can you imagine anything more Mind effing to the anti-Trumpers than if, and we don't know this is going to happen yet, so I'm getting ahead of myself, but I do predict it will happen.
What will the anti-Trumpers say if Trump comes up with a pretty good, and I won't even say great, if he comes up with a pretty good, Improvement on our trade agreement with China.
And let's say it includes a lot of the intellectual property stuff.
Now, nobody would expect China not to try to cheat on stuff, because, you know, it's the real world.
But if we have an agreement that's got some teeth in it that says if you do cheat, these things will happen, we might have something really good coming out of this.
Don't know. Too early to say.
But suppose it happens.
What would that do to the people who thought he was a crazy maniac?
It will show that his approach is the best we've ever seen.
And by his approach, I'm going to describe it this way.
Being respectful and personal to the leaders of countries that are, in some ways, Antagonistic to us, sometimes enemies, sometimes just competitors.
But he's respectful and personal and very complimentary to the leader.
At the same time, he acts as tough as possible in the negotiations.
That formula is probably going to be the formula that forever is considered the standard.
Assuming things go well with China, and then I'm also going to assume that things go well with North Korea, because I think they are.
Now, I'm still seeing people on social media saying to me, Scott, you idiot, you idiot, can't you see that the president has accomplished nothing in North Korea?
And that's a real head-shaker.
Because how could you watch the news for the past two years and conclude that the president has accomplished nothing with North Korea?
Now, you could certainly say there's a lot more to go.
You could certainly say it has not reached the standard that we hope it will get to.
Very reasonable things to say.
In fact, most people would agree.
But to say that literally nothing good has happened?
That's not part of the sane world.
And here's how I like to describe it.
What the president did was he removed the reason for nuclear war with North Korea.
He took the reason away.
The reason it was ever a risk is that North Korea was pretty sure we wanted to attack them at any minute.
Do you think that they believe that now?
Nope. Do you believe that North Korea thinks that their nuclear weapons are now a strategic asset or now a strategic liability?
What do you think is the mental process of Kim Jong-un?
And I don't know if anybody else matters in terms of decision-making, but let's say just Kim.
Do you think he sees his own nukes as an asset?
Because he's not at war with anybody.
What do you use them for?
The president's being nice.
He's offering economic development.
We have no border disputes.
South Korea is okay with them.
China is okay with them. Exactly who would go to war with North Korea?
Nobody. Nobody.
So at the moment, Kim's nukes are sort of a bargaining chip, but they're also his biggest liability.
It's the thing that is making him least, let's say, least likely to stay in his job.
Because we've offered something much better than having nukes.
And I think the president has sold that version of reality in a way that Kim can look at it and say, "Yeah, he's met with me twice.
I've looked in his eyes.
We get along great.
I don't think he means to kill me." If you spend enough time in a room with somebody, you could probably detect whether they plan to kill you.
Like, literally kill you.
And I think that if you spend enough time with Trump and he and Kim get along, They have some laughs. They figure out what to do about economic development.
They agree that they need to get to denuclearization.
The details may not matter so much in the short run.
In the long run, they matter, of course.
I think it's the biggest accomplishment maybe any leader has ever achieved.
Somebody said that Nixon going to China might be the same level of accomplishment.
But I don't know if we were on the brink of nuclear war with China.
Maybe some historians can correct me on that.
But it seems to me that taking somebody from the brink of nuclear war to, hey buddy, can we talk about nuclear development, is the biggest accomplishment of any president.
I don't know that anybody's ever done anything That clever and that good that you could specifically say was the President's action.
I don't think anybody is saying, well, the President was in charge, but other things happened and other people were doing things and there were other forces that made the good thing happen.
I don't think anybody is saying that.
I think people are saying that his exact personality and his exact strategy with North Korea turned a nuclear holocaust into a Economic opportunity.
Nobody's ever done anything like that before.
It's enormous.
And I would think that we're on a very long path to not having a nuclear risk, whatever that looks like.
I'm loving the fact that Bernie Sanders is getting a lot of heat for apparently he used a lot of private jets when he was helping Hillary Clinton campaign.
So because he was busy, flying commercial is not really effective.
So in order to make all the stops that Hillary Clinton wanted of him, he requested and got private jet service.
But, of course, that works against his green climate change kind of a vibe, so he's getting a lot of heat for that.
Now, on a realistic level, I'm really not the guy who's going to say that a leader taking a private jet is ever a bad idea.
I am of the opinion The rational opinion that if your leader is the one who has the biggest leverage in terms of how things go, they should take private planes.
And their time is worth more than other people's time.
And you just can't compare what the leader does to what the population as a whole should do.
So that's crazy.
But it works against Bernie.
And the funniest part was one of Bernie's ex-campaign people said that the Clinton supporters or the Clinton campaign people were just huge assholes.
He said they're all assholes.
And they're just like terrible people for letting this story about the jet requests get out.
All right. So you may have seen that Joel Pollack retweeted with some inflammatory language Chris Cuomo's little bit he did I think last night in which he played a clip of the president saying out of context that he played clips as if the president had called the Protest the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people.
Now, of course, that's fake news.
He did not call the neo-Nazis fine people, but CNN reports it that way.
What of course he was speaking about was that there were fine people on both sides of the Confederate statue issue more generally.
Now, I'm against Confederate statues, so I'm not on his side on that point, but nonetheless, It's being reported in a fake news way.
Let me call out for you.
Some more dog that isn't barking.
So remember, it was about a week ago, I said I'm going to say in public, loudly and clearly, that the Charlottesville report that the president said the neo-Nazis were fine people.
I'm going to say it's fake news and a hoax.
I'm going to say it loudly and publicly and watch how none of the outlets that normally cover me is going to cover it.
Now, can you think of any other major story that someone as prominent as I am, and I'm not the most prominent person in the world, but you've observed that if I say something controversial, it's definitely in the news.
If I say something that gets me a little bit off the path, it's news every time.
It's not news everywhere, but there's always some liberal-leaning publication that'll say, ah, this idiot is saying X. And I predicted that I would say the most outrageous thing you could possibly say, which is a major story, Was fake news and a hoax and that I could back it up and it's obvious that it's a hoax and that there would be no news coverage.
And you watched it, right?
Did you not observe that literally no one touched my comment?
No one on the left who believes that the Charlottesville hoax is real.
No one even mentioned it.
It's like it didn't happen.
Coincidence. It's not a coincidence.
It's not a coincidence at all.
And if you think about the unlikeliness of that prediction, it was very unlikely that I could say something that insanely radical and get no coverage on it whatsoever.
And I told you why.
They can't cover it. Now, doubling down...
Joel has now commented on it, and I think he might be writing something about it.
But again, he's a very prominent person in the political world.
Breitbart is a prominent publication.
And when he says in public that Chris Cuomo is lying, lying, he called him a liar.
Do you think that Chris Cuomo will respond?
Now normally what would happen if somebody reports news and someone else prominent calls them out and says, you're literally a liar.
What would be the normal response of the person who's being called a liar?
They would respond, right?
You're not going to see it.
So I predict that you will not see something like a real response.
You know, there might be like a brush back or something.
But I don't think Chris Cuomo can respond in any way.
Because if he does, it's going to bring attention to the accusation.
And the accusation is so much stronger than the fake news.
That he's not going to be able to survive even the conversation.
When I say survive, I mean in terms of his interpretation of the world.
So watch for the dog that doesn't bark.
Watch how loudly and often we can say the obvious statement that the Charlottesville reporting is fake news and a hoax and the most dangerous thing that's ever happened in this country, in my opinion.
So dangerous, in fact, that I was wondering If there could be a class action suit against CNN. Now I'm very much against class action suits and lawsuits.
I just think it's a horrible world to live in.
You know, I don't want to get any and so therefore I typically resist suing anybody.
I've never sued anybody by the way.
In my whole life I've never sued anybody.
I don't think. Yeah, I've never sued anybody.
It's because I just don't like the whole world.
Don't like it to happen to me.
Don't like it to happen to other people.
Don't like to be involved in lawsuits.
There's just almost always a better way to handle this stuff.
But from a legal perspective, I wondered, you see how dangerous it is to go outside and Wearing a Trump hat.
You know, just any kind of a pro-Trump shirt or MAGA hat or anything.
And you've seen how dangerous that is.
You've seen how it could affect your career.
You've seen how it could affect your safety.
Now, what's the biggest cause of that lack of safety?
Well, I would say, unambiguously, the biggest cause is the Charlottesville hoax.
Because it doesn't live alone.
There are lots of accusations against this president for every manner of thing.
But all the rest of them are a little bit thin.
So, for example, we'd say, well, what about when he announced he was running and he said that Mexicans are rapists and murderers?
Well, even the people who were worried about that certainly understand that that was hyperbole.
And that he did not mean that the women and children coming across the border were also rapists.
No reasonable person could look at that statement and assume that he thought they were all racist.
And nobody assumes that that was the one time he didn't use hyperbole.
If somebody uses hyperbole all the time, And that's the most ordinary explanation for what happened during his announcement.
It was a little more hyperbole.
He made the risk of people coming across the border sound a little higher than you've heard it before.
Normal hyperbole.
So when you see stuff like that, It's not enough.
It's not enough to create the bubble of fear and just the crazy stuff that the anti-Trumpers are thinking.
It's the Charlottesville hoax that's the king of all the hoaxes.
It's the one that people think, this one we don't have to wonder about.
Because we heard it in his own words.
That's what people think about the Charlottesville hoax.
They believe they heard something racist that was contemporary, meaning current.
And in his own words, and unambiguous this time.
Those are the things you could see the argument.
You could say, okay, maybe I'm taking this out of context.
But with Charlottesville, people said, this one seems just too obvious.
It's his own words.
It's being reported everywhere.
It's his own words.
How could I be wrong?
That's what makes it a hoax, because it was out of context.
It was a hoax, and it's the big one.
It's the mother of all hoaxes.
The Charlottesville hoax is the mother of the Smollett hoax.
It's the mother of the Covington hoax.
It's the mother of all hoaxes.
And it's the one that is the most resistant to any kind of reason.
I just had a back and forth with somebody here on Twitter.
Oh, I wish I could... Maybe I can find it.
Because I wanted to show you what happens when you expose someone who believes in the Charlottesville hoax, when you show them the actual quotes and the context, and then you tell them it's obvious that he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis as being fine people.
What happens to somebody, if you watch my Twitter exchange, that was this morning, they will devolve into word salad.
You should see it just for entertainment and education purposes.
It's on my Twitter feed this morning.
It's somebody I was going back and forth with.
Watch what happened to his last couple of tweets.
They actually don't even make sense.
They're words, and they form something like a paragraph, but they're actually just nonsense.
And did some of you see it?
If there's anybody on here who witnessed that, I'd just look for a confirmation that he did devolve.
A word salad is when you have words in a sentence, but they stop having meaning.
They just fit together as words, but they don't fit together with meaning.
Yeah, so you're seeing some people confirm now that he devolved into actual babble, just babble.
Now the babble is when you know you've, and by the way, I'm not making this next part up.
When you get that kind of babble, irrational, word salad answer, it means somebody has been pushed into cognitive dissonance.
As a trained hypnotist, I've seen this many, many times.
If you're new to it, it's shocking and you might misinterpret it.
You might look at it and say, ah, he must be just a troll.
And when you got him with your logic, he's trying whatever he can.
And maybe that's part of it.
But it's a classic signal for someone who's trying to get out of their mental prison, but they can't.
They hit a wall. And they just degenerate into word salad.
So let me give you an argument here for my interpretation of the Charlottesville situation versus the hoax interpretation.
My interpretation was that the president went on television and said that there are good people on both sides of the statue debate this makes perfect sense because he's actually said he's in favor of keeping the statues and if any side was bad that was going to be the side that you thought had a problem right the people who want to keep the statues I'm not in favor of keeping statues I think they're offensive but that I'm just giving you that as background so you know my own bias But,
since he has been publicly in favor of statues, you would think that he would say, well, they're good people on both sides of the statue question because he is one of those people.
In his own mind, he's a good person, don't you think?
Don't you think that the President thinks he's a good person?
Don't you think that he thinks his buddies, his advisors who also want to keep the statues, the writers, the people on the right who want to keep them, don't you think that the President actually thinks they're good people?
Of course he does. There's no mind reading involved in that.
That's sort of an obvious statement, right?
Nobody would really disagree with that.
So my interpretation is completely normal and consistent with everything we've seen before and everything we saw after, because he specifically condemned the neo-Nazis and the racists when asked to clarify.
So the normal explanation is is completely normal, completely consistent with the past, fits all the data, completely consistent with his clarification later, and everything he's done since then.
Now let's look at the hoax interpretation.
Here's what you need To know, here's what you need to believe is true in order to buy into the hoax that the president went on live TV and said racists were fine people.
You'd have to believe, first of all, that my more obvious and normal explanation is the wrong one.
So right away, you're on shaky ground, right?
Because there's a normal explanation that explains all the data.
You'd have to believe that he sided against his own family.
Let me put it this way.
Here's a quote for you.
If you want to quote me later, here's the pull quote.
I wrote it down so I'd say it right.
The only difference between Antifa and the neo-Nazis who were at Charlottesville, the only difference...
Well, not the only difference.
Let me say it again.
A big difference between Antifa and the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville is which members of the Trump family they wanted to kill.
The big difference between Antifa And the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville is which members of the Trump family they wanted to kill.
Now I would say that probably the Antifa people would have loved to see bad things happening to the president and probably to Jared because he's central to the administration.
Whereas the neo-Nazis Would be more about deporting Ivanka and Jared and the president's grandchildren.
So where the neo-Nazis would also want to kill Trump's grandchildren, Antifa would only want to kill Trump himself and maybe Ivanka and Jared.
So the big difference between them is which members of the Trump family they wanted to kill.
Now, CNN is reporting that the President said there were good people on both sides.
Do you believe that the President of the United States went on television and said, well, here's two groups.
They want to kill different parts of my family.
One wants to kill, you know, me and Jared and maybe Ivanka.
And then the other side wants to kill, doesn't want to kill me, but definitely wants to kill Jared and my grandkids.
But I'm not sure about Ivanka because she's converted.
But in both cases, both sides want to kill members of my family.
CNN is reporting that the president said there are fine people in both of those groups.
Does that sound reasonable?
Does that sound like something he thought?
I don't think so. In order to believe the Charlottesville hoax, you would have to believe that the president consciously went on television and thought to himself, I think I'll say some good things about the racists marching with tiki torches.
Does that sound reasonable?
Does that sound even a little bit reasonable?
Now, and even if you believe that, then you have to believe the second part.
That the next day when he was asked to clarify, he unambiguously clarified that he disavows, completely, completely disavows the racists and the neo-Nazis.
So now you'd have to believe, if you're going to buy into the Charlottesville hoax, that this was the one time, the one time that we know of, maybe you can think of another, but I think it's the one time, that Trump changed his opinion because it was unpopular.
How often does that happen?
Do you believe that this president, if he had really held those views that people imagined he held, you think he wouldn't say that a second time?
Do you think that he would have backed off of that?
That's not the president you're watching.
The president you're watching doesn't give a flying F what you think of his opinion.
If he said it once, he would say it again.
If he said something that sounded ambiguous and then he clarified it to be completely consistent with everything he's ever said on the topic, completely consistent, that should mean something.
In order to believe the Charlottesville hoax, you would have to also believe that he was sending a secret dog whistle by completely disavowing that group.
Now, what kind of a secret dog whistle do you send when there's an ambiguous statement, and then he clarifies it, and he clarifies it as clearly as possible, that he completely disavows the racists and the neo-Nazis.
Is that a dog whistle?
Because that's like a really bad dog whistle.
Let me give you an example.
If I wanted to dog whistle my approval of you, would I call you ugly and stupid?
So if I said, Bob is ugly and stupid, would you say to yourself, there's that secret dog whistle.
I think he's in love with Bob.
I think he and Bob got a little going on here, because he just called them ugly and stupid.
Well, you know, where's this dog whistle that we keep hearing about?
The next thing you'd have to think about, in order to believe the Charlottesville hoax, you'd have to also believe that Israel didn't notice.
That they didn't notice.
Or somehow that they didn't mind.
That the President of the United States was backing the anti-Semites marching in Charlottesville.
Do you think Israel would give him a pass on that, if it were true?
Do you think Israel believes CNN's reporting?
Do you think Netanyahu sees Cuomo saying, watching, you know, reporting that the president praised the people who were marching with anti-Semitic statements?
Do you think Netanyahu watches that and said, oh yeah, that's real news?
Not a chance.
There isn't the slightest chance that Israel thinks that news is true.
Is Israel stupid?
No evidence of that.
Does Israel have a really fine-tuned sensor for detecting anti-Semitism?
I think they do.
I think they've had some practice.
And if they don't see it, who do you trust?
On a question of is something anti-Semitic, do you trust Israel or CNN? One of them is credible on that question.
You would have to also believe, if you believed in the Charlottesville hoax, you would have to believe that the 60 million Trump supporters are okay with it.
You'd have to believe that 60 million people would be okay in this country with the sitting president Praising white supremacists marching, saying anti-Semitic things.
60 million of them who somehow didn't notice this.
Now, if you told me a million people believed it in a hoax, I'd say, well, yeah, a million people believe anything.
But 60 million?
And you can't find probably anybody in that group who believes he actually called the racist fine people 60 million?
None of them noticed?
None of them noticed, right?
Let's see Alright.
So, that's my point.
Now, having completely demolished the idea that the president called the Charlottesville Nazis fine people, do you think this will become a story?
Nope. I will be completely ignored.
And they'll wait a few weeks and then they'll report it again like it's fact.
But wait for this.
If you see any kind of response, I won't even say that because there's no chance that you won't see any kind of response.
But if you did see a response, it would be word salad.
So that's my prediction. Prediction is you'll either see no response, or you'll see one that is word salad.
In other words, it'll be words that fit together, but they don't quite mean anything.
All right.
CNS is a North Korea flame story yesterday vanished after you said it.
I don't even remember what that was.
Say something bad right next to it and get in trouble.
Yeah, that's an interesting technique.
So somebody's suggesting that I pair my statements about the Charlottesville hoax with something that's just so horrible they have to cover it.
Oh, yeah.
So we're going to see some more Michael Cohen statements that, who knows?
You know, anonymous, unnamed sources are saying they know what Michael Cohen's going to say to Congress.
I'm going to go to the next one.
Michael Cohen is literally famous for being an incompetent liar.
Who will say whatever he needs to say to further his interests?
So it's going to be interesting because he almost certainly is going to come up with some damaging stuff about Trump.
And it's going to be so not believable.
And it makes me wonder, especially in the context of the smaller thing in the Covington thing.
I wonder if CNN is just going to get their ass kicked for even reporting it.
I guess everybody has to report it because it'll be public and it'll be news.
But it's got to be an uncomfortable situation because I think they're going to know that it's not credible.
But how do they treat it in the context of all the fake news lately?
All right. That's all I got to say for now.
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