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May 7, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:28
Episode 521 Scott Adams: “Fine People” Zombie HOAX, Reframing Immigration, Lawyers
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Bum, bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, hey everybody, good to see you.
It's time for a coffee with Scott Adams.
Hello, Andrew, Chris.
Come on in. There are still seats available if you hurry.
Somebody says, any thoughts?
I know you've been thinking about it.
Well, I don't know what the topic is.
I probably do have some thoughts, and I've probably been thinking about it.
But you know, right now is time for that special, special moment in your day.
The day that tells you, today is going to be a good day.
If this is going so well, I like to think the rest of the day is going to go well too.
It starts with a little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
It starts when you grab a cup or a glass or a mug.
It might be a stein or a tankard or a chalice.
Could be a thermos, might be a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the simultaneous sip.
I like coffee. Savor it.
Enjoy it. It's good stuff.
Well, we've got a lot of crazy stuff going on today.
I barely know where to start.
Let's start with a parody account for AOC that was apparently suspended by Twitter.
It was called the AOC Press account, and it was clearly labeled parody with the actual word parody.
But it got banned.
I usually wait a little while because I like to see what it was that got it banned exactly.
I don't know if the problem was only that it wasn't labeled clearly enough in somebody's opinion.
I will tell you that even though it did say parody, clearly and specifically, I have to think a lot of people were fooled into thinking it was real.
Because it was such a good parody that it was hard to distinguish from the original, which is why it was so good.
I had even called it out on my Twitter as being one of the best parody accounts I've seen.
One of the best because sometimes you really couldn't tell.
You just couldn't tell.
The account would always say, Insanely stupid things, but they were the kind of insanely stupid things that you could really imagine she might have said.
So it might be the first parody account that's ever been removed for being too true to the original.
Even labeled parody.
Now, I would say, if we don't learn more about what happened, this would certainly be an obvious overreach in terms of blocking certain types of voices.
But I have to think that the main reason it got blocked It was maybe not written in the terms of service, but rather it was just so good that I have to admit, I've read that account a number of times because I followed both the parody and also AOC, and I couldn't always tell, and I would have to actually look at the profile and say, okay, is this the parody one or is this the real one?
I can't tell. And I would actually have to check every time to make sure it was really a parody.
Yeah. But, so we'll be watching that.
I don't know if there's more information to come.
I don't know if that decision will stand.
But certainly on the surface, It doesn't seem to be consistent with Twitter's own rules, based on what we know.
I always like to say it's fog of war, wait two days and see if any of the data changes.
All right. You may have noticed that the anti-Trump press is getting a little agitated at the fact that the The fine people hoax has been so completely dismantled.
Now, you've seen, who was it?
Was it Daily Beast or BuzzFeed?
I get those two confused.
Neither of them are serious publications.
But one of them came up with the, you know, push the hoax again.
The Washington Post had a big article today pushing it.
Jake Tapper retweeted that with a pull quote.
And so we're seeing a massive pushback.
Now, just listen to these facts and see how you process them.
So the Washington Post does a very long article saying that the president and his people are trying to rewrite history about the Charlottesville fine people hoax.
In other words, Trump is saying, I said the right thing, and it was reported wrong, and it was hoax.
Now, they go through the whole thing, blah, blah, blah.
But interestingly, they do not back the The original hoax.
So the original hoax was that the president called the neo-Nazis fine people.
It's a whole article debunking the debunking, but they don't really talk about the main point.
Instead, they throw a lot of confusion at you until you start to think, well, that maybe the problem was that it was, and this is obviously it is a problem, but it was organized by neo-Nazis and racists.
And so that's the problem.
Now remember, that was never the fine people hoax claim.
The claim, right, they've changed it so it's a different claim that they can try to support.
And Now that claim is a little bit off point, because it's a true fact, and as Jake Tapper mentioned in his retweeting of the Washington Post article, he pulled out the fact that it's true that it was organized by neo-Nazis.
It is, however...
Not relevant to the primary point.
It's very relevant to understanding the whole situation.
So as context, it's 100% relevant.
But in terms of the fine people hoax, not relevant.
Because we do know that non-racists who were not with the neo-Nazis and not with the organizers and in fact didn't know it was just supposed to be neo-Nazis.
So the New York Times reported it.
I've actually talked at length with somebody who was there who was not a racist and was surprised to find out what the nature of the event was.
And it all ended very quickly.
As soon as people got there, the trouble had already started.
So The President, having specifically mentioned his assumption that there were people there just about the statue, it doesn't matter to the main point who organized it.
He said, my assumption is there are people there.
I mean, in pretty clear language, he said people there on both sides of the statue.
And then he called out in very specific language, I'm not talking about the organizers.
I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis.
I'm not talking about the white nationals.
So he said that specifically, I'm not talking about them.
So he very clearly was saying that his assumption was there were some people there who were not part of the organized group.
And that was, in fact, confirmed by New York Times reporting and my own reporting, because I've actually talked to somebody who attended.
So, yeah, so it doesn't matter.
But they're trying to make it sound true while simultaneously debunking the original claim.
And they're trying to act as though it was true all along or true-ish or true if you look at it at a concept level or true in some indirect, suggestive way that there might be a racist whistle.
It's all so confusing.
And what about the day before and he was not so clear?
So it reads like a bunch of word salad trying to make a point and missing.
Joel Pollack summed it up perfectly in a tweet in which he pointed out that they've already abandoned the central claim.
The central claim that he called the neo-Nazis fine people.
And they're trying to make it seem As though his lack of specificity in his first statement, where he said he was against all bigotry and made it a general statement, that the fact that he didn't single out the neo-Nazis by name in his first comments means that that's sort of a racist dog whistle.
That's what they're trying to suggest.
Now, why would the president have to call out that specific group?
This is Joel Pollack's observation, and I love it.
Why would the president need to call out the neo-Nazis specifically when he's made a statement that clearly includes them?
All bigotry is bad.
Well, he would have to call that out because the press created another hoax.
The original hoax is that the president has been whistling at this group.
That's not true. That's the first hoax.
So the second hoax that he's whistling to them again by not mentioning them by name is based on the first hoax.
It's not based on facts.
It's based on their first hoax that everything he says is a secret whistle.
Once you believe that hoax, then it starts to make sense.
Hey, why didn't he mention them by name?
Well, if they had never started the first hoaxes, nobody would be confused by the fact that he said bigotry, which should have included every group, you know, against everybody.
So that was a great point, I thought.
But here's the most interesting thing about the Washington Post's article.
It's obviously being written because there's been pushback from the President and his supporters, On that hoax.
Now, how does the Washington Post write a very long article on this topic without mentioning me?
How do they write that topic without mentioning Steve Cortez, who's been hammering it in the press, hammering it on CNN, tweeting about it?
How do they do that without mentioning Joel Pollack?
Who's been writing articles about it and tweeting it, especially recently.
How did they write that article without linking to my blog post that explains the entire sequence and how the hoax is created and how they go down the hoax funnel?
They actually can't show the context of their own article The context of their article is not just what the president said and Kellyanne Conway said about it.
That's not the whole context.
The context is that his supporters and that there's a big pushback.
That's a big, big, big part of the story.
They just left it out.
Yeah, they can't put that in there because it would completely demolish their entire argument.
So my blog post on the fine people hoax explains exactly what the Washington Post did in the article before they did it.
That's the clever part.
So the clever part of my persuasion in writing it as a hoax funnel is that the hoaxers always start at the main claim.
He called those neo-Nazis fine people.
Okay, the transcript says he didn't.
Very clearly he said the opposite of that.
But we'll just move down to, well, he should have known, or is he secret whistling, or why didn't he say it differently?
How do you explain?
Why didn't those people leave?
So it just goes down to smaller and smaller claims until it's just vapor.
And if they were to point to my blog post, it would predict their article before they wrote it.
My blog post tells you what their article is going to do Before they wrote it.
It's kind of devastating.
So, of course they can't mention that.
But when you see the pushback this hard, they're desperately trying to cling to that hoax.
By the way, they never call it the fine people hoax.
Given all the number of us who've called it that, it's got a hashtag, the fine people hoax, they never refer to it as the other people call it the fine people hoax.
They say things like, well, they're trying to rewrite history.
When you put it in those terms, and you say somebody's trying to rewrite history, you're trying to get to the conclusion without the argument.
So if you say to me, Scott, you seem to be a cartoonist.
If I deal with the facts, that's one thing.
But if I say, ah, trying to rewrite history, I've gone right past the facts to an unsupported conclusion.
So when the Washington Post says that the president is trying to rewrite history, they don't They don't back that claim.
Because rewriting history would be dealing with the specific hoax.
Who was he talking about when he referred to the fine people?
And he was very clear.
Show the whole quote. He said, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
Enough about that. I heard in the news that the president was thinking about having some kind of a three-way nuclear deal.
He floated this idea with Russia and China and the U.S., To get their nukes down.
China has put the kibosh on that idea, because apparently China only has a few hundred nukes, where the US and China has thousands each.
And so China, fairly reasonably, says, why don't you work on your own nuclear problem, because, you know, get down to our level and then we'll talk, essentially.
So I don't think China's wrong about that.
Because they're saying, hey, if the US and Russia has so many more nukes, get down to our level, and then maybe we have something to talk about.
They didn't say it that way, but that's the inference.
Now, I would say that the President's instinct to have a three-way nuclear deal is a mistake.
So it's a persuasion mistake.
Here's why. It gets too specific about the nukes.
Personally, I think the lowest risk that we have is that the US, Russia, or China would try to nuke each other because of mutually assured destruction.
It probably isn't the biggest problem.
You know, we can imagine it big, and if something went wrong, it would be the biggest problem, of course.
But probably that risk is pretty well controlled, because we're not intentionally going to lob a nuclear weapon at each other.
It just won't happen. And it seems to me that the President would have made more progress, saying, let's make a three-way deal for the benefit of North Korea.
That's the three-way deal you want to get going.
Because if you make that one work, it's small.
Everybody has the same interests.
There shouldn't be that much difference between what Russia, China, and the U.S. want in terms of North Korea.
We would like them denuclearized.
We'd like them to be prosperous and not a problem.
We'd like them not to be messing with our countries.
So if we could get something smaller that was a defense-related...
Military-related agreement, even a small one, that had Russia, U.S., and China as signatories, we could gain confidence that the three of us can work towards solving these smaller problems, working against terrorism threats, and keeping the world a stable place.
When you've got three countries that are the winners, let's say, They're not the only winners in the world, but they're dominant countries militarily.
In Russia's case, they're not dominant economically.
They have a smaller economy than Italy, apparently.
But militarily and in terms of their punching, they punch above their weight.
So we're three countries who should make a pact not to fight with each other and make a pact to solve our mutual problems.
Because we, you know, we would be pretty effective if the three of us said, all right, we're just going to work together and solve these problems.
Anyway, so I think start smaller, and then the nuclear question becomes less relevant.
What are the odds that China, Russia, and the US would be working productively to solve North Korea and then also nuke each other?
You know, it gets you to the wrong place.
Somebody says that's a bit naive.
Now, the naivety that I imagine you're speaking to is that each of these countries would pursue their own best interests, and historically they thought that hurting the United States in various ways It would be part of their self-interest.
So I acknowledge that if our mental frames of how the three countries are approaching it stays exactly the same as it has been, then any agreement would just be BS because nobody would intend to follow it.
They would just sign the thing and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and they would just keep doing all the bad things they do.
Now, I'm not in favor of that agreement.
I'm in favor of using a small agreement with North Korea to build trust and show that working together can solve mutual problems.
So if you do it small, you might be able to start changing the framework where people say, it's just not helping us to poke this other big country that can poke us back.
What good did it do Putin to interfere with US elections?
Did that help Putin?
I don't think so.
All right, enough on that.
Somebody asked me, why do I... This is the common question I'm getting.
So once I've taken people down the fine people hoax funnel, and they come all the way down at the end, and they realize they've been hoaxed, they come at me on Twitter and they say this, as somebody did this morning.
Why do you spend so much time on that hoax, the fine people hoax, But you don't spend time debunking the president's lies, as they call them.
And then he shows me an example of a lie.
And the lie that he says I should be debunking is that the president is claiming he created 8.9 million jobs, but there's a study that says it's some small number, like trivially small number.
And he says, why don't you debunk the president's claim that he made the economy gain all those jobs?
Why are you only doing the other hoax?
To which I say, there's a real big difference between hyperbole that is used to boost the GDP. So every time the president says he's done something good or he's doing something good or something he did makes a difference, it makes people feel confident.
They buy more.
They invest more. And that's what makes the GDP go up.
The economy is a psychology engine.
The president works directly on the psychology of it, and you can see right in front of your eyes, he is a big part of why it's at the highest point it's ever been.
Now, I, unlike other people, I do give Obama credit for creating a strong base and for getting us off of the edge of the cliff.
He did those things.
I don't take that away from him.
But growth, when you're coming out of a hole, is sort of easy to get.
That's the easy growth.
So I give Obama full credit For keeping us from falling off the ledge, getting a strong base, and getting the easy wins.
You know, it's easy to put somebody back to work if they're already trained for exactly that job.
This part of the economic climb is the hard part.
If you're hiring somebody today, you're probably hiring somebody who is not trained for the job.
And might not even be able to get a job under normal conditions.
So you're trying to hire the hardest to hire people.
And so if you have good performance when you're already good, that's hard.
That's the hard stuff.
And the president has delivered that.
So the reason that I talk about the Charlottesville fine people hoax is that is destructive to the country.
It's driving us apart.
It's causing a racial divide that's not real, and it's going to convince people it's real.
It's terribly destructive.
The Russia collusion hoax, terribly destructive to the country.
The president saying that he's doing great things for the economy?
100% positive, unambiguously, completely on point.
Exactly, if you were going to create a president, like just invent one, and you could invent a president, you would invent this president to be in charge of the economy.
I'm not talking about every part of his job, but if you were to invent a perfect character, For the times and for this economy, which is already doing well, you could not pick a better person than President Trump with his hyperbole, which keeps our sense of the economy high, which keeps the economy high.
It is not unrelated.
These are direct, strong points.
Likewise, when the President says, you know, ISIS is defeated, but it turns out that, you know, they're still scrappy little group.
It's hyperbole.
But do you want ISIS to think they're doing fine?
Or do you want the potential people who might join ISIS to hear the president say, yeah, we just wiped him out.
There's not much left.
We're just mopping up the rest.
Which message gets you to a better world for the United States?
Well, that's a lie, hyperbole, that's entirely positive.
When the president says white supremacy, he doesn't think it's the biggest problem in the world, and people say, why are you saying that?
Why would the president make it a tiny problem in terms of statistics, not in terms of how it affects us emotionally?
But if you look at all the ways people die in this country, there are far more bicycle accidents than there are white supremacists or any other kind of terrorist acts.
So it's a tiny problem.
The president tried to describe it as a tiny problem so that people who might be drawn to it look at it and say, well, that's not really a growing thing.
Maybe I don't want to be part of that.
So the president downplays things that he wants less of.
He tends to exaggerate things he wants more of, and he's managing the public's impressions of things directly.
So you can't compare that to a negative hoax.
A negative hoax to tear the country apart is literally the opposite of what the president does when he uses his hyperbole, and let's say he drifts from the fact-checking.
All right. I noted today that there were, what, 600 attorneys who signed some kind of a letter saying that they believed that the President would be guilty of obstruction of justice if he were not the President.
Did you catch the trick?
600 attorneys signed a letter saying that if President Trump were not the President, he certainly would have been indicted for obstructing justice.
There are two tricks there.
Do you see them both? Trick number one.
How many attorneys disagree?
If you don't know that, you don't know anything, do you?
Does it matter how many people signed a petition?
If you don't know how many people were opposed to it?
It doesn't matter. It is a data point taken in the context to make you think that most attorneys would agree.
Complete deception.
Now, if there were a poll of attorneys and 80% of them were on the same side, I'd say, whoa, that's telling me something.
That's real information.
No matter how big that number is, 600, 1,000, it doesn't matter unless you know how many are on the other side.
If it's roughly even, then all you know is its political statements.
Is it roughly even?
I don't know. But there's a second trick.
Did you catch it? So the first trick is, it doesn't matter how many are on one side, you have to know how many are on the other side, or you don't know anything.
There's literally no information, except that there are some people who are on one political side for sure.
Here's the other part.
They say he would be indicted if he were not president.
Do you know why he wasn't indicted?
Because he was president.
And if you're doing the job of a president, it's not obstruction of justice to do your job.
So, a lot of what they were saying were clear indications of obstruction of justice.
We're also a president who knew that there was nothing there, and he was managing to that fact, that there was no substance to the claim.
Now, was that his job?
Would we the people have been better off if he could have made this go away?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Was firing... Now, by the way, I'm not saying that that was his intention.
I'm just saying that if it had gone away, we'd be better off.
And I'd be happy with my president because we know now what he knew all along, which is that it was a witch hunt.
So if the president fires Comey, That's the president's job.
Likewise. So anyway, the main point here is that when the lawyers say he would be indicted if he were not president, the answer is, that's what everybody says.
Both sides say that.
The fact that he's the president means that it was his job to manage these people, which means it's not clearly obstruction, and if it's not clearly obstruction...
You're not guilty of anything in this country.
In this country, you need evidence of a crime that's beyond a reasonable doubt, or we say you didn't commit a crime.
The president, because he was the president, these were within his job descriptions, and therefore it's not clear that it would pass the Supreme Court, etc.
Anyway, that's the Dershowitz argument.
I hope I didn't get it wrong, which is that you can't find obstruction of justice with a president who's doing the job of a president.
So that was a tricky thing in the news.
I would call that a hoax. Wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you say that's just a clear hoax?
Because they leave out the number of people who think he would not be...
Oh, and by the way, here's the other thing.
They say if he were not a president, he would be indicted.
That's three tricks.
Right? I believe it's actually possible that he could even get indicted, even as president.
Could he be convicted?
Do you think this president could ever be convicted by 12 jurors for doing something that's clearly in his job description, and the only evidence that it was a crime is that we imagined what he was thinking, which isn't a thing.
That's not evidence. You can't imagine what people are thinking.
And it was a witch hunt.
And he knew it was a witch hunt.
He didn't have to wonder.
The president was the only person who knew for sure it was a witch hunt.
Everybody else sort of maybe thought, well, I think it isn't, or I think it is, but we don't know.
He actually knew. So no.
So there are the three tricks.
They say 600 attorneys, but you don't know how many would have had the opposite opinion.
They say if he weren't president...
But of course, the fact that he was doing the job of a president makes it not obstruction of justice.
So that's a trick word.
And then lastly, they say he would be indicted.
Well, maybe.
But he wouldn't be convicted.
There isn't the slightest chance you could get 12 jurors to convict him given this set of facts.
There's not even a slight chance.
So that would have been a more honest way to say it.
He couldn't have been convicted.
Let's talk about...
Oh, the President's approval has reached 46% to 50%, depending on what poll you're at.
Apparently it's even higher than Obama's.
Not that anybody should be proud of that.
I don't think Obama's approval was so high most of the time.
But if you reach 50% approval as President, shouldn't we call that 100% approval?
Think about it.
If I said to you, we did a poll to find out who approves the president, and I asked my headphones, and the headphones do not approve of the president, should I include the headphones in my poll and say, okay, I asked the headphones and they do not approve of the president?
No, you'd say that's stupid.
You say, why are you doing a poll of headphones?
And by the way, headphones can't speak and they don't have opinions.
That'd be dumb. Makes no sense.
Likewise, when you do a poll and you ask a hardcore Democrat, what do you think of this Republican president?
Does it matter which president it is?
I mean, really? Does it matter?
It does not. So why do you include in a poll, an opinion poll, People who are not operating on the basis of opinion.
They're simply on a team.
The only people who matter are the persuadables, which is probably this thin sliver of people who could at least demonstrate that they voted for presidents on different sides of the aisle sometime in the last 20 years.
Wouldn't that be interesting?
Wouldn't you like to see a poll of people who have voted Democrat at least once and Republican at least once for president in the past 20 years?
And just ask that group.
What do you think of this president?
Do you think it would be 50%?
Because you would be taking out of it All of the people who, first of all, definitely would say yes just because he's Republican, they would be eliminated.
But you'd also be taking out the people who would disagree with him just because he's Republican.
These are not real opinion polls.
Because an opinion poll would be talking to people who form opinions.
These are polls of people who do not form opinions.
They adopt opinions.
There's a big difference. They're simply, they accept opinions that are presented to them.
That's not really having an opinion.
All right, enough about that.
Let's talk about immigration.
Immigration's been at a standstill.
For some reason, we've got this great crisis at the border that the news just decided they don't want to talk about it, because obviously the more the news talks about the humanitarian crisis at the border, the better it is for Trump, because it's just proving that everything he's been saying about that danger is true.
But we're still stuck, and So I'm going to go to the whiteboard and suggest some reframing ideas to get us off of zero on the immigration question.
Number one reframe, there's going to be two reframes.
Here's the first one. As we have learned recently, we do not have a problem with the border between Mexico and the United States because Mexico and the United States do not share a border.
If that's the first time you've heard that, you might have some trouble believing what I'm going to tell you right now.
But you can do your own research.
Brandon Darby would be a good place to start.
You could Google him, Brandon Darby, D-A-R-B-Y. And he writes about this, travels here all the time, and he will tell you that the border zone, and this is not drawn to scale, but the border zone That would have been between Mexico and the United States is no longer controlled by Mexico.
This is actually controlled entirely by the cartels, at least the parts that matter, right?
There are some rocky places that nobody cares about, but the parts that matter are controlled by the cartels because they make money by controlling the people who try to get across the border.
So they charge them They charge them basically an access fee and a safety fee to get across the border.
They also do a lot of raping and God knows what else.
So we've been talking consistently about a border between Mexico and the United States when no such thing exists.
And I'm not using hyperbole.
Have you ever seen the Mexican army operating on the border?
Have you ever wondered, well, the Mexican army could just sort of put some people there.
They could stop this tomorrow, couldn't they?
Why wouldn't they want to stop it?
I'm sure they have good reasons for not wanting to stop.
The reason you don't see the Mexican army in this territory is because it's not their country.
They don't own this territory.
And it wouldn't be safe for them to go there.
The Mexican army...
Can't enter another country without starting a war.
And that's exactly what would happen.
So every time that we say we're talking about the border between Mexico and the United States, that's simply not true in any real-world way.
It's true in a technical way.
It's true if you look at the map.
It's true if you see whose embassy claims the territory.
It's true in a technical way.
But we don't live in a technical world.
We live in the real world.
And in the real world, we don't have a border between Mexico and the United States.
It just doesn't exist.
Now, if you're trying to sell people on a border, a border security, what's easier?
We'd like to build a big scary wall between Mexico, one of our closest allies, who are filled with people we like.
Who just want a better life for themselves.
That's what we've been trying to sell.
We've been trying to keep out people we like, who are, you know, the country of Mexico is very much an ally of the United States.
Most of us personally know people who came from Mexico, and we love them.
I love the people I know who came from Mexico.
Mexico has a lot of awesome people.
So, if you're telling me to spend 25 billion dollars keeping these awesome people from getting good jobs and helping our farmers, well, that's not much of an argument.
Like, that just sounds kind of racist.
Honestly, sounds a little racist, doesn't it?
It's like, well, they're awesome.
They just want a better life.
They're allies. But they're brown.
So it must be the brown part that wants you to keep them out.
Now, I'm not saying any of that's true.
I'm saying the way we process it is it's hard to get people to understand why you need a wall to keep your friends away.
Because Mexico is our friends, in general.
But you do need a wall.
To keep the head-chopping cartels away.
In fact, I was going to draw this bigger so I could draw little severed heads, little severed heads laying around.
And there are a lot of severed heads and dead bodies in this territory, in Mexico in general.
All right, so that's the first reframing.
We should just stop saying we're building a border between Mexico and the United States, because that doesn't exist.
It's not real in any important way.
Here's another reframing.
I talked about this, but it helps to make it visual.
Excuse me while I awkwardly turn my amazing whiteboard around.
Here we go. Yes, it's a whiteboard with two sizes.
Now, what I'm going to show you here is just sort of an example.
Don't take this too literally.
So this is immigration plans.
This is the way that the citizens of the country need to see the argument presented so that we can be part of the decision and maybe move it off the logjam situation it's in.
We should figure out what the major plans are.
And let's say, just for simplicity, let's say there's a do-nothing plan.
I put it as zero, but it's not really zero.
We still spend money on it all the time.
But there's something like a business-as-usual plan, where we do nothing beyond the baseline.
That would be zero. Then there's a Democrat plan.
I'm just throwing an example number in.
maybe they say over 10 years, throw $5 billion at it, mostly for humanitarian, etc.
If we're talking about whether we should have a wall or not, somebody's telling me that this is cutting out.
Good.
Isn't it interesting when it cuts out?
Let me see if we can get the audio to work.
Yeah, I know.
I'm just waiting. Just waiting to see if it comes back.
All right. I'm looking for your comments to see if we have...
Okay, you're back. Let me just summarize in case you missed some of it.
So the idea is that we, the citizens, would like to see this border debate broken down in a way we could understand so that the citizens can participate in persuading the government in whatever way they want.
There's always a do-nothing plan, which is the baseline spending.
I set it as zero, but of course it's not zero.
The democratic plan where they wouldn't spend as much and they might put it more toward electronic surveillance and they might put more of it toward the humanitarian parts.
And let's imagine there's a GOP plan, which takes care of everything from E-Verify to you name it, and it costs a lot more, whatever that number is.
I'm just putting in numbers for an example.
Then you would say, what are the things that are the most important?
And again, these are just examples.
I'm not suggesting this is the order of importance or that it is complete.
I'm just saying this is how you would express it.
You say, for each of these plans, what would you expect over 10 years in terms of drug overdoses?
So the zero plan would be the same amount of drug overdoses we have.
These guys would be kind of similar, and then maybe you'd decrease it a little bit if you thought it would really make a difference.
I don't know if it would. Number of sex assaults.
How many rapes are you getting in the baseline?
How many rapes would you get into the Democrat plan?
How many under the GOP? Again, murders, GDP, unemployment rate, and maybe you could come up with a few other things.
Somebody's saying, papers please, and e-verify.
If you're talking about that you need a wall or e-verify, if you're talking about the details, I would say that's how you get the log jam.
Because as soon as you talk about the details, people disagree in the details, they don't know the details, don't understand it.
You just can't get there from here.
What you need is just three plans.
Let's say the GOP plan has a merit-based system.
They've got all kinds of things built in.
We don't need to know the details.
We just need to know what's it going to cost, and then what do you think you're going to buy with this, and then have some kind of independent groups look at it.
Of course, they will disagree on the estimates, but we should have estimates.
The exact accuracy of the estimates is less important than that there might be a difference that's identifiable.
So, for example, let's say just take sex assaults.
The do-nothing plan gets you 100,000, I'm just making up a number, but probably 100,000 rapes in 10 years.
I don't think that's even high, right?
Don't you think if you do nothing, your plan is to have 100,000 rapes?
That's what you're planning for.
The Democrat plan, depending on what it is, maybe that would be a smaller number, maybe not much smaller.
And the GOP plan is not going to eliminate it.
But if you stop the caravans, you stop most of the flow, you can make an argument that you could cut it by 25%, cut it by 50%.
And you could be way off.
Maybe you thought you would cut rapes by 50%, but you only cut it by 25%.
It still might be the best plan.
So you don't have to be exact in these estimates, but you do need to see what are the priorities.
And what's the best guess based on experts for how that would play out?
If you don't break it down into this simple form and you start arguing about the details, oh, we need E-Verify, we need, you know, our farmers need workers, what about this, what about guest workers?
Those are all good things to talk about, but we as the public, we just want to know two things.
What's it going to cost?
And what are we going to get for it?
If you give us more than that, then too many cooks are getting into the soup.
So let the GOP say, we want to put these steps in there, these elements, these changes.
Let the experts figure it out.
Let the experts figure it out.
We're not experts. We don't know where a wall belongs.
We don't know when a fence works and what situation.
We don't know if a wall might help sex assaults, but it doesn't help at all on drugs.
We don't know. But there are people who could make those estimates.
Let's see them. Otherwise, we're just spinning.
It's pretty clear at this point that our government can't solve this problem.
And if the government can't solve it, What do you do if you're in a company and you're a worker and you and your co-workers can't agree on something?
You just can't agree. You don't know how to go forward.
What do you do? You kick it up to the boss.
If you can't figure it out, you ask the boss to be the decision maker.
In this case, the public is the boss.
We're the ones who are going to fire these politicians in the voting booth if they don't do the job for us.
So if they can't get it done, and they've proven that they can't, it's obvious that the Congress is not the right body to do this.
They don't have their resources, the will, the personalities.
They just don't have what it would take to solve this, largely because of politics.
So they've got to kick it upstairs.
You've got to turn it over to the boss.
And the boss is you, or at least most of you, who are American voters.
You are the ones who are going to have to solve this.
But you can't help until somebody's given you the PowerPoint presentation as you would to your boss.
Here's the simple thing.
We've got three plans.
Now here's the beauty. The GOP does not need to wait...
For the Dems to come up with a plan.
They don't have to wait.
They could just say, here's our plan, and here's what we're going to buy with this money.
Half as many rapes, etc.
They can just plug in the Democrat plan as best they know it.
Because there's sort of the bones of a general consensus of, you know, don't build a wall, put this much money in for electronic stuff and better checkpoint security, etc.
We kind of know what that would look like.
So just plop it in there.
Let the Democrats revise it.
If you put in the Democrat plan and the Democrats collectively, let's say Nancy Pelosi.
If Nancy Pelosi says, no, that's not a good look at a Democrat plan, just say, we'll put in whatever plan you want.
Just tell us what the plan looks like.
Which parts do you want to change?
And then just put it in there.
So if you wait for the Democrats to make a plan, you'll wait forever.
You have to plug in their plan as best you can understand it to give the voters some kind of an option and let them revise it if they need to, which I'm sure they would.
So that's how I would get us off of zero on this.
You've got to kick it up to the people, and the only way the people are going to understand it is to first of all explain that it's not a border between U.S. and Mexico.
Mexico? We frickin' love Mexico!
Mexicans? I love Mexicans.
Do you know how many Mexicans I know?
Like, you know, I live in California.
Do you have any idea how many Mexicans and people of Mexican heritage that I know personally?
A lot! They're great!
If you've not met a lot of people who have immigrated, you hear the stories about the criminals and blah blah blah, and there is crime, and there's a lot more of it closer to the border.
Where I'm in Northern California, You really just get the people who wanted a better life.
They want to work for it.
They're not complaining. Really awesome people.
I mean, really, really good people.
Mexican here. And you're all good people.
There are criminals, though.
We can't ignore the fact that there are criminals.
But in general, as a general statement, awesome people.
Somebody says, yes, we are.
So I see some people agreeing with that statement.
Yeah, I mean, I have such good experiences with that community that I have whatever is the opposite of bigotry.
Like, I start to think, well, it seemed like extra good.
And then I think, okay, I shouldn't be thinking that way.
But my impression...
Of the people who have come from Mexico is that they're kind of extra good.
But I don't think I'm allowed to say that.
Yeah, we talked about the AOC parody account.
And I think I've said what I need to say.
And I'm going to cut it off here. I'll go back to fighting the fine people hoax.
And I'll post this and see if it makes any difference.
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