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April 28, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:52
Episode 510 Scott Adams: All the HOAXES Pretending to be News
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Hey everybody.
I hope you're done with church.
Because it's time for the next form of worship.
In this case, it's coffee.
I worship my coffee.
It's not an actual religion, but it could be.
And if you'd like to Give it a try.
Grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your tankard, your stein, your chalice, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Mmm, that could have been warmer.
Well, so MSNBC was in full propaganda mode this morning, somebody says.
So, update on the Find People hoax.
Many of you have been watching me debunk that for the last several months.
Lots of people have joined in.
Steve Cortez, Joel Pollack is all over it.
Carpe Dunctum. And tremendous progress.
I just tweeted around Joel Pollack's article in Breitbart.
Detailing how Jake Tapper now gives the second part of the quote and says, in clear terms, the president wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists when he referred to the fine people.
Now, the hoax is sort of transformed into, well, who was he talking about?
Which actually doesn't matter.
Because the worst case scenario is that he thought other people were there that were not racists.
Well, that's either true or not true, but completely irrelevant.
Because first of all, no one knows who was there.
No complete accounting was ever done.
And if he was wrong on the fact that Well, he was wrong on the fact that a reasonable person would assume was true also.
It's the same thing I assumed.
I assume a big gathering has a diverse group, and even if it's dominated by one group or organized by one group, A lot of other people show up if you give it enough attention.
I just saw there was some kind of audit by the city in which they did identify people who were there not affiliated with any of the named groups.
So even the city has confirmed that it was a diverse group.
But we don't know exactly what they were thinking.
Anyway. So now we've seen in the past week New York, of course the New York Times actually interviewed one of the people who was not with the racists and just was there about the statue and was not racist.
So it's hard to refute that and even PolitiFact has included it with the full quote now but they refuse to actually call the The fine people thing, a lie. So they've gone full Mueller.
You know how everybody criticized Mueller for not making a decision on obstruction?
Well, PolitiFact just went full Mueller on this fine people hoax.
And they said, well, why don't we just show it to you in context?
You decide this one. Their very point, the entire thing that PolitiFact does is they give you their opinion Of whether something's a fact or not.
But this one time, this one time, they've decided not to give an opinion.
They've gone full Mueller.
Why? Well, it's obvious why.
Because giving that opinion would be the second biggest hoax in political history after the Russia collusion.
And I'm not sure that the mental health of the anti-Trumpers can handle all that All that revealing of reality in the same time zone.
Or time frame, I guess.
So, this morning, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, retweeted Joel Pollack's article from Breitbart.
Now, that article talked about Jake Tapper giving now the full context, where before it was typical for CNN to give just the first part of the quote, which was misleading, about the fine people.
And so the founder of Wikipedia retweets that article.
Now, of course, somebody jumps on him and says, Jimmy Wales, why are you retweeting Breitbart?
And of course the answer is that Breitbart is talking about CNN and it's talking about both of them agreeing.
So you've got an outlet identified with the right and an outlet identified with the left, CNN and Breitbart, and they were on the same page on the fact.
Who was the first major outlet To get the find people hoax correct, who was not identified with the right?
Answer? Wikipedia.
Wikipedia beat every news outlet on the left, associated with the left, to get this right.
And now all the other outlets are starting to report it in its full context.
So, I love the fact Wikipedia is continually attacked for bias or whatever.
But let's call it out.
Let's call it out when they beat the pack.
Wikipedia was the most reliable outlet that wasn't clearly associated with politics on the right.
They got it first and they got it right.
All right. So that was interesting.
So I guess Trump said in his rally speech last night, he said, quote, now we're sending, he's talking about the illegal immigrants, they get rounded up.
He said, now we're sending many of them to sanctuary cities.
Thank you very much, he told the crowd in Green Bay.
They ain't so happy about it.
I'm proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea.
So Trump is actually calling it his own sick idea to send them to sanctuary cities.
Now, the question is, is that true?
Now, the claim is that we're sending many of them to sanctuary cities.
That's probably true, isn't it?
It may not be any more than they were ever sending to sanctuary cities before.
It might be. It might not be.
But the claim is that they're sending people to sanctuary cities.
And I would guess that's probably true.
Meaning that if they just do business as usual, some of those immigrants are going to end up in sanctuary cities, right?
So his claim might be technically true.
But it's going to be interpreted a little bit differently than the strictly technically true part.
The President also talked about executing babies after they're born.
Now, people on social media...
It came up to me after I was debunking the Charlottesville hoax, and they said to me, and I quote, Scott, why aren't you also spending all your time in your whiteboard trying to debunk this abortion claim about executing babies?
To which I say, I have, without the whiteboard.
I didn't really need the whiteboard.
But how often have you heard me debunk that hoax?
Often, right? So every time somebody comes after me and says, aha, you are being a hypocrite because you debunk this, but you don't debunk that, almost always they're wrong.
Almost always.
Now, so I tweeted this morning CNN's take on the fact-checking of that comment, and CNN was weirdly ambiguous.
In their fact check.
They did fact check that the law he was talking about, the specific law, they say already has a penalty built into it for if anybody kills a live, viable baby, it's just murder.
So they fact checked the president's claim as not true, but then they referenced the Northam quote Without fact-checking it.
So the Northam quote was about a different law in a different state, but for some reason, CNN's fact-check did not go so far as to say, and it was also untrue when people misinterpreted Northam.
They didn't say that.
They simply showed it for context.
Now, I had been saying that the Northam thing was a hoax, but I really did expect CNN to back me up on that.
And maybe they have in other places.
I haven't looked that hard. But it just tripped a little flag.
It's like, wait a minute.
They're being so clear about this other state and this other law, and then they only mention Northam without saying that he also got it wrong in the same way?
If that's the case.
Now, I think he was taken out of context, and there were some assumptions he was making.
That are not clear in the video, and so if you only look at the video, it looks exactly as bad as everybody's saying.
But remember, if you only looked at the first part of the Charlottesville Fine People quote, you would go away thinking that you'd seen it with your own eyes, and you couldn't possibly be wrong, and the president clearly, you heard it, you saw it, It's called Neo-Nazis Find People.
And then you see the rest of the quote, and he clarifies, I'm totally not talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
So if you don't see the second part, you don't see it in context, you would go away saying, Scott, are you freaking crazy?
I saw it with my own eyes.
I heard it with my own ears.
Everybody's reporting it.
How are you saying that didn't happen?
So just remember, it's common...
It's ordinary.
It's universal that people on both sides, on a regular basis, believe they are seeing and hearing things with their own senses and therefore cannot be wrong.
Unfortunately, we no longer live in that era because videos and even transcripts can be so easily taken out of context to turn them into their opposites.
So, if you see something that you say, I'm looking at it with my own eyes and my own ears, and I know that I'm seeing it, here's how you check to see if you've been duped.
I suggest this rule not for this case, but for all cases.
And it goes like this.
If the facts, not the opinions, if the facts Are reported the same on left-leaning organizations and right-leaning news organizations?
It's almost certainly a fact.
If you only see it on one, doesn't matter which one, just the right or just the left, and again, I'm not talking about opinion.
I'm talking about a point of fact.
If you only see a point of fact reported on one side, it's a hoax.
It's a hoax. So ask yourself, and I don't know the answer to this, have you ever seen a left-leaning news organization say anything that was similar to there is a law in any state that allows a doctor and the mother to decide to let a baby die that would otherwise be viable and has already been born?
Is there any left-leaning site that has ever said that that's true?
As far as I know, that's never happened.
And I want you to hold that rule And keep that in mind every time you see one of these situations.
Now remember, you're going to see opinions all over the place.
But on the point of fact, whether such a law exists that would allow the mother and the doctor to literally kill a baby that would not have otherwise died if they'd given a care, just ask yourself why nobody reports that as fact on one entire side.
Now, to be fair, the fine people hoax It looked like only the right-leaning organizations were reporting it as a hoax, and it looked like only the left-leaning organizations were reporting it as completely true.
But if you crawl through all of the links and the articles, you'll find that the New York Times interviewed somebody who was a fine person, who did not come there for racism, came there about statues, and it's a real person who has a name, and they talk to her, and she's part of a group.
That felt the same.
So there was a left-leaning organization that reported the fact, and there were times when left-leaning organizations, at least once, printed the entirety of Trump's transcript.
So there was, in fact, a very obvious footprint on both the left and the right.
The right was shouting it a little louder, and The left was underplaying it, but they both reported the fact.
The fact that there were other fine people there, confirmed, and the fact that the president specifically excluded the races.
So when you apply this rule, it takes a little skill to know what actually has been talked about and what hasn't, but you can suss it out.
All right. So I will leave you that rule.
Instead of giving you my opinion on whether executing the baby claim is true or a hoax, just use that rule.
If you don't like how it comes out for you on this topic, see how often the rule works for other topics.
And if you note that that rule works for other topics, then I would say give it more credibility.
All right.
Can you be for human rights and be for abortion?
Yes, you can.
The way everybody makes their decisions on abortion is by pretending that the words make the decision.
So abortion is not a logic argument.
It's not really a fact-based argument.
People try to make it that way.
But the entire argument for or against abortion is that...
I forgot where I was going then.
The abortion debate depends on people inserting their own definition of when life begins, which is an unsolvable problem.
In other words, there's no objective way where we can do an experiment and say, well, here's life, and here's not life.
So the pro-life people say it begins at conception, and I would say that's a perfectly moral position.
That is a 100% morally appropriate position, that if there's any ambiguity about when life begins, it's life!
That's the most morally clean position, because it allows that you might even be wrong about where life begins.
But as long as there's ambiguity, Morally clean opinion is that you don't take a chance.
Maybe it's life.
Maybe it's not. Now, the people who are on the other side are not really arguing the morality of it.
They're arguing sort of a freedom question.
So they're saying that the real question is who gets to decide.
Now, they don't say it the way I'm saying it, but in essence, this is the argument.
So the pro-abortion argument is who gets to decide.
Because we live in a world where it's a decision.
Somebody has to make a life and death decision, especially if there's any competition between will the mother have a risk to her life versus the child.
Somebody has to make the decision.
So the pro-abortion is not so much we think we want to kill babies.
They try to define it away from being life to make the argument easier, but that's not really the argument.
The argument is who makes the decision.
And the pro-abortion people are saying the only reasonable way to do this is that the mother, who clearly has the most skin in the game other than the unborn child, the mother can make a decision, but a fetus or an unborn child can't make a decision.
The government can make a decision, or the mother can make a decision working with the doctor.
So the pro-abortion people are weirdly saying that the government should stay out of their business on this case.
So if you're on the anti-abortion side, you have a weird situation in which you're promoting the government making decisions over the individual, which is a weird place to be if you're conservative.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong.
I'm not giving you an opinion in any of this.
I'm just describing the situation.
So there's an incongruity on the left in which they favor a little bit of government intervention when normally they would run away from that.
But, to be fair, murder is already illegal.
So I'm sure that people on the right don't say this is a little extra, extra government involvement.
They would say this isn't extra.
This is freaking exactly what we do for adult people.
It doesn't matter when you became a person.
We're just saying murder is murder in our opinion.
So the right interestingly does a terrible job of promoting their opinion because theirs is based on this is a terrible, terrible decision to make And somebody has to make it.
Who is it? The only decision you get is who makes the decision.
Because if you're saying to yourself, if we let the mother make the decision under these circumstances, if we let the doctor do it, if you don't let them do it, you're saying that somebody else could do it better.
Can they? I don't know.
So this is why I recuse myself from an opinion on abortion.
I recuse myself because as a man, if I weigh in, I'm somewhat, in a small way, I'm decreasing the weight of women's opinion on this topic.
And my philosophical preference is that since this is basically an impossible situation, the way people see the world, it's impossible that everybody's going to be on the same side.
The most credible outcome is when women have a stronger voice in this, just this topic, not every topic in the world, but just this topic, The most credible outcome is when women have a bigger voice than men.
And so I recuse myself.
So in my small way, I can let that happen.
All right. Yeah, you know, people are throwing their arguments at me.
Do fathers have skin in the game?
You can argue yes, obviously less than the mother does.
Do they have financial interests?
Yes. Can the financial interests be a separate decision from the life or death abortion decision?
Yes. You know, if you're asking me about the financial part, then I think men certainly have to have a role in that Lawmaking and opinion making, but not on the life and death decision, I think.
And by the way, I'm not telling any of the men listening to this that you should recuse.
That's your own decision.
You live in a free country, you don't have to recuse from anything.
I'm just telling you that my ethical and moral stand is that I need to recuse.
Because I just think that's a more credible outcome.
All right. I guess we have to talk about this latest synagogue shooter.
Clearly at this point, we're seeing copycats.
Now, the news is going to report that the copycats are coming from, I don't know, President Trump's rhetoric or something.
And it's going to be crazy because, of course, Israel loves Trump, etc.
And the only people painting Trump as a white supremacist is the media.
The fine people hoax being the alpha hoax supporting all the other hoaxes.
So, the media really has to take the hit for this latest shooting, in my opinion.
For anything to happen in this world, all of the variables that supported that thing happening had to be present.
So, I always argue that it's never this one thing that caused the bad thing.
It's everything. You have to have everything for the bad thing to happen.
But one of the everythings Is that the media makes heroes and makes famous these people and gives them the idea.
Gives them the idea.
And And they also, at the same time that the media is giving all these nuts the idea that, hey, shooting up a place of worship, I guess I'll get a lot of attention and they'll all be there and I'll make a big statement because there's more energy to it because it's a place of worship that will get everybody twice as excited as if it weren't.
So, who gets the nuts thinking about doing that?
It's the media. They choose to cover these stories in a way that's guaranteed to make more of these stories.
I predicted back in 1997 or something, in my book, The Dilbert Future, I said that the probable place that the press would end up is killing people to create news.
And that's actually what's happening.
So the news industry, because of the business model of the news, there are certain topics that they can get more attention to, which gives them more money.
And if they run out of things that are happening naturally, If there are not enough disasters, not enough tragedies, I predicted that they would start manufacturing their own strategies, their own tragedies, so that the news business would have fodder.
Now, it may not be a decision to do that.
They may not sit around the boardroom and say, hey, who can we kill?
But by their collective actions and what they care about and don't care about, they've created a clear situation in which they've guaranteed there will be a continuous string of more of these copycat killers because it's all the headlines.
If they had decided, if the media had collectively decided to...
Here's how I would suggest covering these.
We should not ignore them.
We should run a story that says there was a tragedy at this place.
Maybe the basic facts, four entries, two dead.
And then I would recommend that everybody have some website that is completely sanitized of anything interesting, such as the shooter's name.
And they just link to it.
And then if you're on the right or the left, you're on social media, no matter who you are, you just link to the same one page that has nothing but the barest of facts.
There was a shooting.
X people got killed.
The shooter is in custody.
Boom. Nothing else.
Because as soon as you go beyond that and you give it this extra importance because...
And let's be...
I hate to be...
Sound cold about this.
It was a terrible tragedy.
It's like the last thing that we would ever want.
But the truth is that while we were talking about these four victims of this tragedy, probably a hundred people died in automobile accidents.
You know, probably way more people than that were shot in Chicago.
But because they were onesies, you know, and they were acts of passion or crimes or whatever, and we're just used to them, they're not really news.
They need to be...
They need to be packaged the way this latest synagogue shooting was sort of packaged.
Hey, it's got multiple victims.
It connects to the headlines and racism, and it connects to Israel.
It just connects to all of our other things we're thinking about.
So it's the news industry that decides whether or not there will be copycats.
And by their actions, the news industry has made the decision.
They've decided that there will be more of this.
That's a conscious decision.
Now, that's probably not the way they process it.
The way they process it is, this is the news.
Of course we cover the news.
We're the news. If the other side is going to cover it, we have to cover the news.
Imagine how we'd look If this thing happened and that we didn't talk about it, we would look like the people who didn't care about, you know, Jews.
Because, like, why are you downplaying this when there are some victims?
So you can imagine that the news industry has their reasons, their rationalizations for why they have to cover it.
But let me ask you, as a public service, did it make you safer or less safe?
You as a citizen watching this periscope, because the news covered it as thoroughly as they have, is that making you safer or less safe?
I don't think there's any question about it.
It didn't make you safer.
It definitely made you less safe because it's giving another crop of idiots and mentally insane people a bunch of ideas.
They're all getting the ideas like, okay, it's an AR, place of worship, got it.
They're basically giving the recipe for more of these.
I don't know, maybe the news industry could get together and instead of patting themselves on the back at the correspondence dinner, which by the way, I watched a little of that correspondence dinner and also CNN before that.
Don Lemon actually said on live television, so I guess he had to borrow some clothes from Jake Tapper to go on air because of the tragedy.
He was in town to do the correspondence dinner.
But, you know, they put him on the air because of the tragedy.
And he actually complained that the tragedy happened on his big night that they had this event, the correspondence dinner.
You know, like that was the problem.
Yeah, the problem is it ruined Don Lemon's night.
He had to work on a night that he wanted to go enjoy himself at this event.
And I thought... My God, that might be one of the worst things I've ever heard on television.
Now, I'm not the outrage monster, so I don't think that's worthy of outrage.
People who talk on television for a living are going to say things imperfectly.
Trump does it. Don Lemon did it.
But it was jarring to hear it.
I'll just stop there.
I'll just say it was jarring to hear it.
No apologies are needed.
Speaking of apologies, the New York Times has apologized for their international edition.
Now the international edition would have different editors and different management, but apparently the international, not apparently, the international edition ran a comic of Trump wearing a little yarmulke and walking a wiener dog with Netanyahu's face on it that was supposed to represent Israel.
And the moment you see it, If you've lived in the world for very long, especially in this country, the moment you see that cartoon, you go, what the?
And I think WTF was probably the most common response to it.
People looked at it and said, I don't know what I'm seeing here.
Are they really running a gigantic anti-Semitic comic in the New York Times International Edition?
Now, To their credit, the parent company, New York Times, when they saw the blowback, they removed the comic.
They said it was an error in judgment, and the entity that provided them that comic, they deleted it.
Now, of course, people piled on and said, where's my apology?
That's not an apology.
You're just saying it's an error of judgment and that you corrected it.
Now, I'm not the person who was offended personally.
I feel like the only people who could accept the apology, if you even want to call it that, because it wasn't quite framed as an apology, but the only people who could or should consider accepting that as a good response would be the Jewish community.
But I would have to say...
If I were looking at the situation that the New York Times has met my personal standard for good citizenship, if we judge the New York Times by the mistake instead of the capable adjustment and correction to the mistake, I think that's not the world you want to live in.
I think you have to let people correct their mistakes and then say, okay, you know, I see you understand the mistake.
The moment you understood it, you fixed it.
And you said what you did.
You were transparent. You were quick.
You did the only thing that could be done.
I'm going to say the New York Times gets an A for the correction.
Now, if you are a member of the Jewish community and you feel that more is needed in the way of an apology, I would say that that would be up to you, but as just an observer from the outside, if anybody can meet that standard in this world, I made a mistake, bam, I realized it, now I corrected it, and I just told people who care what I did about it.
If you can do that, I'm going to be okay with you about this.
Yeah, I call it the 48-hour rule for correction, and they were well within the 48 hours.
They were well within 24 hours, I think.
So, I love to make fun of my New York Times, as some of you do, but I'm not going to make fun of them for making a mistake which they capably and quickly corrected.
That's just not a standard I want to live with.
Yeah, so somebody's saying, what were the tropes?
In other words, what was it about the cartoon that made it anti-Semitic?
It's an interesting question because I don't know.
I don't know. I mean, I looked at it and I could feel the anti-Semitism.
I could feel it.
It, you know, from just a perceptual sense, it looked obviously offensive.
I never would have, you know, greenlit that kind of comic.
But if you asked me, what's the exact element that makes this anti-Semitic, I'd say, I'm not really the expert on that.
But it is true that a lot of people took it that way.
It must also be true.
It must also be true that the people who originally gave the green light to run that probably didn't see it.
It wasn't obvious to them.
I think that people can be blind to things that other people don't.
Let me give you one rule that really helps you in life.
One of the biggest problems we all make, and we all do, We assume that other people are starting with the same set of knowledge and have the same filter on life that we do.
So when they make a decision that's not the one we make, we start imagining all kinds of reasons why they're making it.
Oh, they're lying, they're stupid, and all those things.
But indeed, people have different starting places.
Let me give you my best example.
Do you remember when Ron DeSantis, who is governor now of Florida, when he was running, he referred to his opponent, who was an African-American gentleman, he referred to him as articulate.
And when he did that, social media and the regular news blew up and said, my God, it's a racist dog whistle, because everyone knows that you don't call a black person articulate.
Because that's a well-known backwards insult.
It's a backwards insult.
Everybody knows that.
So if Ron DeSantis uses this term that everybody knows is an insult to black people, well, it must be intentional.
Now, somebody in the comments is getting ahead of me.
It is also true that Joe Biden is on record referring to, I don't know who he was referring to, oh, Obama, I think.
And he called him articulate, right?
He called Obama articulate.
Now, one of the things I would say about Obama, if I did not already know that this word has this double meaning, if I didn't know the double meaning, I would say, that's actually a pretty good description of Obama.
He's in one articulate mofo.
Now, if you never knew that saying articulate was considered an insult by the vast majority of people, you could easily fall into that.
Because it does fit.
And if you don't know the second meaning, it's just a compliment.
So Biden did it.
DeSantis did it. They both did it in public.
They weren't hiding anything.
In public. Now, what is the more likely explanation...
Of why both of those experienced politicians did that in public.
The most likely explanation is that they didn't realize it would sound that way.
That the second meaning just didn't occur to them.
By far, that's the most likely explanation.
It really stretches imagination that they were cleverly using a dog whistle that literally everybody in the news media recognizes as a dog whistle.
You don't use a secret racist dog whistle that everyone can see.
Let me show you the difference.
If you wanted to send a secret racist dog whistle, it would look like this.
So that's secret.
I'm not trying to make you see it.
Here's what it looks like if you're not trying to send it as a secret.
Tweet! Tweet!
Look at me over here. Tweet!
Tweet! Everybody, you got the camera?
Get the camera on here. Tweet!
Tweet! Okay.
That's not a secret.
So the very minimum requirement for sending a clever, secret, racist dog whistle, if such things exist, is...
You don't do it in a way that literally everybody is going to see.
So it's the least likely explanation that it was a clever trick.
I'm going to use these words and only the special people that I'm trying to get will understand it.
All the rest of the media, they'll never know.
They'll never know.
They can't see this.
It's invisible. It's invisible.
Okay. Maybe.
Now, you can't rule things out, right?
Because we're not mind readers. Maybe that's exactly what both Biden and DeSantis did.
Maybe they are so dumb that they don't know that their secret racist dog whistle is the most famous, obvious, unambiguously racist sounding thing that anybody ever said.
I mean, it's right up there with the N-word as far as you should know.
You know, if you've lived in the world, you should know that's an insult.
So anyway, my main point is that we are so often amazed that educated, experienced people have a blind spot.
But it's the most universal thing in the world.
People do have a blind spot.
Now somebody's saying that it's subconscious.
I'm not buying the idea of subconscious bigotry.
Not that it doesn't exist, because of course it does.
So when I say I'm not buying it, I'm not doubting its existence.
Of course it exists.
We're all subconscious monsters, and we're doing the best we can to fight it.
But as a standard for society, we really need to judge people by how our executive brain manages our monsters.
If we judged each other by what our inner thoughts are, if we judged each other by what we believe are other people's subconscious feelings, you don't want to live in that world.
You do not want to live in a world Where it makes sense and people say, yeah, let's...
I could tell by the choice of words that he's got terrible thoughts.
So I'm going to judge him by the terrible thoughts that I believe he has, even though I can't tell when people have legitimate...
They're giving a tell for their subconscious thoughts versus they just don't know it sounds wrong.
Because that would look exactly alike.
So don't let yourself live in a world...
Where you imagine you can judge people's inner thoughts, you have to judge people by what they do, and even by what they say, you've got to give them a chance to clarify if it sounded wrong the first time.
So the 48-hour rule works well with this.
The 48-hour rule is that I give everybody 48 hours to either apologize or clarify if they've said something accidentally provocative.
And I think that's a good rule, and you should ignore what you imagine people are thinking.
It's just not the world you want to live in.
All right. Has Biden apologized for his hoax video yet?
No. So what we see is that for the last several days, I think most of you have seen this, you've seen that the people who believed the original hoax that the president called the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists to find people, as soon as it's proven to be a hoax, because you can look at the transcript and you can see he said, I condemn totally those groups.
They usually retreat to a weaker position.
It's like, well, it was organized by Nazis, so there's no ambiguity.
It was organized by racists.
But nobody's really saying the organizers were the only ones who showed up.
It was a well-publicized event, and And it turns out we have evidence, you know, from the New York Times interviewing, et cetera, eyewitnesses.
I've even talked to somebody who was there who was not a racist.
And so we have plenty of reason to believe that there were people besides the Nazis who came even though it was organized by Nazis.
Now you can say to yourself, Why in the world would anybody go to an event after seeing that poster?
And it gets to the articulate question.
I convinced myself after a long conversation with somebody who did not see that poster as being as evil as it is, I convinced myself that not everybody sees it the same.
It's a Yanni and Laurel thing.
And specifically, the way that they saw it differently is they didn't really recognize the design as being something that you should have raised a flag, you know, just by its design elements, but also didn't recognize all the names.
So there were names of speakers, and if you only recognize one of them as a racist...
You might have said to yourself, as this person did, oh, I thought it was one of these free speech things where it doesn't matter how bad you are, you still get to speak.
And then the assumption being that not everybody is a racist, but there was one in the mix.
Now, I don't agree with that assumption at all.
And I didn't have anything like that kind of impression when I looked at the poster.
But I do understand I live in a world of Yanni and Laurel, where people can literally look at the same thing right in front of them and see two different worlds.
So we know that to be true.
And we know that people make decisions for all kinds of crazy reasons that we can't even imagine.
In fact, I would go so far as to say the most likely explanation for anything you see, in terms of a decision that somebody makes, the most likely explanation is always the thing you didn't imagine.
Now, the thing you didn't imagine is the grab bag for all of the things you don't imagine.
But how many times have you had a situation where you said, well, there's only one thing that can explain this set of events.
And then you find out that the reality is just completely different from the one thing you thought was the only thing that could explain it.
Because you hadn't imagined There could be this weird other explanation.
You just couldn't imagine it.
So sometimes we confuse our inability to imagine Alternative explanations with the fact that this must be true.
Sometimes it's just a lack of imagination.
I would guess that any group of 100 Americans gathered in any place for any reason, or any event, not any reason, but if you put any group of 100 Americans, you will have a lot of different opinions, even if they came for the same event.
You're going to get a lot of nuance.
That's just guaranteed. So, that's all I got for now.
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