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April 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
17:33
Episode 497 Scott Adams: Watching Bill Barr
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Time Text
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
We're a little bit early, as some of you have noted, because I didn't want to miss this moment.
We've all waited so long.
Now, like every other moment we've had, it's not really going to be the moment, because after Bill Barr talks, people are going to say, but we want to see the report.
And then you'll think, oh...
The report, once that's out, that's the moment.
And then when that's out, the Democrats will say, we want to see what's redacted.
So it's never going to be over.
And the one thing that we can guarantee is that people are going to hear two completely different movies.
The one thing we already know for sure is that nobody's mind will be changed.
Now, does this seem breathtaking to you?
That we've reached a point in history where, and remember, I'm going to remind you often, that I predicted we would be here at this point in history in 2015.
I told you that Trump would change more than politics.
I said it often and publicly.
They said that what he will change is our entire understanding of reality.
And what I meant by that was the old understanding reality is that people are rational, they care about facts, they use reason, they change their mind when the information changes.
Oh sure, there are some people who don't, and oh sure, there are some people who are just advocates.
But for the most part, people are reasonable and they look at data and stuff.
And I told you that you were going to learn that none of that was true.
That your most basic assumption about reality was false.
And today we're all waiting for this bar report.
And what do 100% of the citizens watching this think?
Every one of us thinks the same thing.
It's not going to change anybody's mind.
We all understand now that information doesn't change minds.
Think about that. Pretty much everybody accepts that as truth now.
Would you have accepted that to be true in 2015?
I don't think you would.
I really don't think you would.
I think most people would have said, man, when that information comes out, we'll have the information, then finally we'll all, you know, not everybody, but mostly the country will have a consensus around whatever this information is.
You know nothing like that's going to happen.
Nothing even slightly like that's going to happen.
The needle will not move.
No matter what this report says, no matter what it says, it won't move the needle.
So to me, that's the big story.
It's not even the politics of it.
It's how we've changed in our understanding of reality.
If I'd said to you back in, let's say, 2014, We're going to have a president who the fact-checkers say is, let's say, departing from factual record 8,000 times in a year.
He'll say 8,000 things that are just factually not true according to the fact-checkers.
And if I told you, and at the same time, everything's going to be great, who told you that both of those things would be true?
I didn't. I told you that Trump would completely ignore the detailed factual world in favor of more of a directional truth.
Directionally, we wanted better immigration.
Directionally, you want a better economy.
Directionally, you want to beat ISIS. You want to have peace with North Korea.
So directionally, Trump was always spot on.
That's why he got elected.
And nobody, and absolutely nobody who...
Who has been supporting him has changed their mind because he didn't pass the fact check 8,000 times.
It absolutely doesn't make any difference.
And I told you that would be the case.
All right. I don't have my sound on yet.
I've been waiting for the visual of Bill Barr to come.
Let's just take a minute to enjoy the show.
I mean, this is really, really good reality TV. One of the things that people criticize Trump for is running the earpieces so I can listen to the sound without it playing through your audio.
Oh, here he is. I'm going to go silent, and I will hear it, but you're going to have to have your own source on.
All right, so I'm going silent.
Let's listen to Bill Barr.
Damn Russian song.
No cooperation. Or any other American.
No coordination with the troll farm.
Legal theories.
Non-corrupt motives.
Non-corrupt motives.
No presidential redactions.
No executive privilege.
Let's see what the pundits say.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm going to switch to CNN. Because I want to see...
I know that Fox News is going to say, well, I guess everything's good.
No problem.
But CNN is no doubt going to say, my God, justice has been perverted.
Jake Tapper giving him a clean, clean bill of health.
Alright, so I turned off my source for a moment.
I'll just give you some of my comments.
Any of you who are still listening?
So the most interesting part is that the Mueller report apparently reports on what the president's sincere state of mind was in regards to whether he was obstructing or not.
Now, a lot of people are going to say, wait a minute, how could anybody, Mueller or anybody else, know what the president's sincere state of mind was?
How could that possibly be known?
We're not mind readers.
But it turns out we don't have to read minds.
And watch for nobody to say what I'm going to say right now.
The President was the only person in the world who knew he was innocent.
Let me say that again, because you probably won't hear anybody else say this.
President Trump was the only person in the entire world, he was the only person who knew for sure that he was innocent.
Nobody else knew that.
So when we look at his state of mind, we say, well, we can't read his mind.
Yes, we can.
What do innocent people think about their own guilt?
Innocent people think they're innocent.
So you don't have to wonder what he was thinking.
There's never been anybody who ever thought they were innocent who thought they were guilty.
It's probably in the history of the world this has never happened.
So if you look at the president through your own filter and say, well, if he didn't know there was some collusion, then maybe he shouldn't have acted that way until we find out if there's collusion.
But that's not his state of mind.
His state of mind was he knew he had not colluded.
He wasn't guessing.
He's the only one who knew.
And so when he was trying to Maybe put a little pressure on the investigation to wrap up, or to go easy on Flynn or anything else.
He was operating from a point of knowledge.
The only person.
The only person in the world who actually knew for sure what the reality was.
Nobody else knew. So, we'll see if the news...
And the pundits grapple with the fact that the president is the only person who wasn't guessing if he was obstructing with justice.
Because he knew there was no justice there to obstruct.
He just wanted to get past it, which he would of course do if he were innocent.
So that's fascinating.
I've never heard that state of mind was so important for whether or not you violated the law.
So I guess I don't know the legal theory behind when you look at their state of mind and when you don't.
Now, interestingly, Bill Barr did not mention anything negative about the president.
I'm not sure that that was his job to do so because he dealt with the charges that were essential to the report.
So it probably makes sense that Bill Barr did not bother to mention anything that was sort of a side-finding not relative to the main point.
One of the most interesting things was one of the reporters asked Bill Barr Could he defend, essentially, paraphrasing here, could he defend himself against the charge that he was bending over backwards to protect the president?
And you know what? He missed one of the greatest moments you'll ever have.
Because if I'm Bill Barr and somebody in the media says, you know, it seems that you're bending over backwards to protect the president, do you know what the right answer is?
I would bend over backwards to protect any American citizen.
I would bend over backwards to protect any American citizen.
That's my frickin' job!
His job!
His job! Bill Barr's job is to protect Americans.
Period. That's, you know, there's details to his job, but that's basically his job.
The president is not above the law, but he's damn sure not below the law.
All right? The president is not above the law, but don't make the mistake of thinking he's below the law.
And we pay Bill Barr.
Bill Barr is there to protect innocent people.
If he's not giving his full effort to protect the president as a citizen of the country, Bill Barr is not doing his job.
So whether he was talking about the president or anybody else, Democrats, doesn't matter who, if they are American citizens and Bill Barr is in that job, damn well right he's protecting.
He should be protecting as hard as he possibly could.
That's what I saw. I saw Bill Barr protecting the President.
And you damn well believe that if you were in that position as just a citizen, not the President of the United States, you want Bill Barr protecting you too, because that's his job.
His job is to protect innocent people.
All right. Although the press won't see it that way.
So had he not bent over backwards...
On the presumption of innocent, I would have had a real problem with that.
And it wouldn't matter who he was talking about, any citizen or the president or a Democrat.
It would have been the same.
You better bend over backwards to protect innocent Americans.
You better. So...
I guess there's enough on that.
All right. I'm going to go watch the news because I don't think we want to even think about or talk about anything else.
I'm going to go watch the...
I'll probably spend more time watching CNN today than Fox News, which is reverse my normal pattern.
But I just have to see what the CNN pundits can manufacture out of nothing.
Now, I think they're still going to be obsessing over Don Jr.'s meeting, why wasn't that mentioned, etc.
But I think that probably gets the state of mind as well.
He needed to use the word innocence.
You know, the justice system does not find people innocents.
Innocent is not, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think innocent is a word that the legal system uses.
Because they can't prove you didn't do something.
They can only attempt to prove you did, and in failing than that, they can say no crime was found.
That's as far as they can or should go.
They can't prove you didn't do something.
Because, you know, who knows?
They can't prove that Trump didn't have some secret conversation with some Russian somewhere, and nobody knows about it.
You can't prove nothing happened.
You can only prove that there's no evidence of a crime.
It's as far as you can go.
Tell us what you think about the Trump tweet.
Let's see what that Trump tweet is.
I assume it's a brand new one.
Let's see. It's going to be a good one.
So Trump just tweeted a Game of Thrones meme, no collusion, no obstructions, for the haters and the radical left Democrats.
Game over. In a Game of Thrones kind of font.
Best show ever.
I love the fact also that Trump, before the Bill Barr thing, Trump says, Attorney General Barr's press conference today, watching it on Fox News and OAN, two N's.
So he's actually telling you which networks to watch it on.
The president is making TV recommendations now.
I could not love this more.
There was a time when most of you probably thought, hey, this president is acting too much like it's a game show.
He's turning the government into a reality TV show.
He can't do that.
And what did I tell you from day one?
He can do that, and it will be an improvement in every way.
He did do it.
He did turn the government into a reality TV show.
And it improved the government, in my opinion, because he can now talk directly to the people.
You know, he just tweets to us, tells us what to think, tells us what to watch.
We watch, we play along, it's interactive.
The public has never been more engaged in every political topic.
This president, because of his reality show approach to government, which is brilliant, he understands the show.
The way I like to summarize that whole thing is that President Trump does and always has, he understands the show.
People think in stories.
People think in visuals.
They want a show.
They need the show.
He brings the show. Nobody ever thought of that before, oddly enough.
He's the first one to think of it.
Or at least the first one to execute it as well.
So he brings the show, and all of us are so much more educated on every topic.
I mean, I can tell you, you know, Kim Jong-un, you know, I know that he was testing something that might have been anti-aircraft or rocket launchers or something.
I mean, you know, we don't know the details, so I don't know the details.
But... Think about how much you learned about your government and about the policies and about the challenges.
You've learned a lot.
No, it's never been anything like this.
We've learned the legal system.
We've learned what collusion obstruction of justice.
We've learned stuff about immigration we never knew.
We've learned, you know, we don't know enough about healthcare.
That's still a big black hole.
But... CBS is still talking impeachment, somebody says.
All right. I don't want to miss the reactions to this.
I'm missing it on CNN. All right.
So I'm going to go watch CNN and get some more reactions.
I'll probably come back to you later today.
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