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May 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:00
Episode 523 Scott Adams: Social Media Bans on Conservatives, Also a Bunch of Good News
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Everybody get in here.
Come on. Come on.
We've got a lot of stuff to talk about today.
Some of it's good.
Some of it's not as good.
Some of it's great.
The news is actually filled with really, really good news.
There's some scary stuff, too.
You always have those stories.
But the news...
It's starting to shape up if you're following all the news, not just the political news.
There are some really good things happening in the world that don't get much attention, but I'll give them a little bit of love today.
Thanks for coming in.
Would you like to join me for the simultaneous sip?
I know you would. Grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your tanker, your stein, your chelis, your thermos, your flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for this simultaneous sip.
That could have been warmer.
Still delicious.
Well, in no particular order, South Korea has reported that North Korea has launched what they call an unidentified projectile into the ocean.
Now, maybe it was a missile.
But my guess is that the unidentified projectile that North Korea launched into the ocean was probably the guy who was their lead negotiator on that last summit.
Because that guy didn't deliver.
So I've got a feeling that the projectiles might be, you know, uncles and cousins who are not playing well with the dear leader.
Just kidding. On another story, Senator Cornyn Has tweeted about Denver approving legalized psychedelic mushrooms.
And the senator says, what could go wrong?
It's a fair question.
It sounds pretty risky if you're not deeply into the science of psychedelics and mushrooms.
And so I just retweeted that I'm guessing, and this is just a guess, There's something close to 100% of all the people who have ever tried psychedelic mushrooms.
Not 100%, but probably something...
Really?
Did I lose audio again?
I'll wait for a second.
We'll wait. Wait.
Let me know when the audio comes back on.
Who says no?
Alright, a lot of people are saying no, but...
Alright, so we have audio.
So, something close to 100% of people who have tried magic mushrooms, I'm guessing, I don't have data on this, but I'm guessing, that 100% of them, or something close to it, would say, we should try it.
Try legalizing it.
Not try mushrooms, but we should try legalizing it.
As a whole bunch of therapeutic benefits and whole life benefits, which I have experienced, I do not recommend them.
I want to make this very clear.
I do not recommend marijuana.
I do not recommend magic mushrooms.
Because they are essentially medicinal things.
And if you haven't heard it from a doctor or you're not adventurous, don't go near them.
But it is true that a number of people...
Have had life-changing experiences, and I would count myself as one of them.
It changes forever how you see the world in a good way, even just one experience.
So, to Senator John Cornyn, I say, if they tested in one place, let's say Denver, it does minimize the potential risk and that we can find out.
Whenever you have that situation where there's an ability to test something locally and just find out what happens.
Is it good? Is it bad?
Let's find out. I'm never opposed to it.
So it's safe enough and smart enough that it does make sense that somebody is testing it in one city.
If it doesn't work out, it won't come to a city near you.
I wouldn't worry about it. Here's a flash from the past.
Do you remember, I think it was last summer, when the president tweeted, jobs not mobs?
And he was talking about all the mobs of Antifa and other protesters who were always in the streets.
Now, is it my imagination, or have the mobs largely dissipated since then?
Am I wrong, or is it just a summer thing?
Maybe there'll be more of them in the summer, just because the weather's better?
But could somebody fact-check me on that?
It seems like the number of times Antifa or any of the mobs have gone to the street, it feels like a lot less.
But I've not seen reporting on that.
It's just a feeling.
So somebody's saying it's seasonal, but I guess we'll find out.
So let's put just a question mark on that.
Have you noticed, and I'm going to talk about more good news today than you're used to, so this will make you feel good, I hope.
Have you noticed that the critics of the president are not pushing him hard On the China negotiations, you know, looking a little tentative because China sort of pulled back a little bit.
They're doing this little dance.
Have you noticed that, and I didn't see it, but I think Chuck Schumer actually backed the president on this.
When was the last time you saw the Democrats pull back from criticizing the president on a primary policy thing?
I would like to thank the Democrats.
So when something good happens, I like to call it out, because maybe you get more of it if you call it out.
The trade deal with China is as close as you can get to a military confrontation without the military part.
It's sort of a war, you know, it's an economic war, but it does seem that the Democrats have completely abandoned attacking the president While he's negotiating.
Do you see how important that is?
If the Democrats were attacking the President for trying to get this deal, it would be a lot harder to get a deal, and you would expect that China would take advantage of that.
They would look at us and say, ha ha ha, we can do anything we want, because we have a strong leader who can just make all the decisions, but over there they're fighting about it, so the President isn't going to get everything he wants.
It's going to be too politically difficult for him.
We're going to get a good deal.
But have you noticed...
To their credit, the Democrats, as much as they hate this president, when it comes down to brass tacks, they got in line.
And when I say got in line, I mean they recognize they're part of the team.
So it's always good to call out that when things really throw down, when the United States is genuinely challenged militarily, Economically, we're all on the same team.
So, am I wrong?
Has anybody noticed a big pushback by the Democrats?
They're either ignoring it, which is maybe as good as you can get as presidential elections are coming close, or they're positive in terms of staying tough against China.
So, if I'm wrong in that, fact check me.
But it looks to me that the Democrats are soft peddling whatever differences they might have with the President on that issue alone.
So, let's talk about some other things.
There's an interesting thing happening with the climate change debates.
So apparently climate change is trading places between number one and two on the top priority of voters between healthcare and climate change.
So those are one and two in the priorities.
And I think there was a recent poll that put climate change at number one.
So I saw a bunch of stories about climate change, recent ones.
So stories that are just in the past week or so.
And there are quite a few of them.
And so I clicked on all those stories because the related stories came up as suggestions.
And I wanted to see what they're saying about nuclear.
And so it was story after story, which took the same, you know, editorial point of view, which is that climate change is a big problem, and if we don't do something really, really seriously and really, really soon, it's going to be a big problem.
And then I was looking through the story, and they were long ones.
You know, these are not like short blurbs.
These are lengthy stories.
And I'm looking for them to mention nuclear power as the only solution.
It's not even mentioned.
They don't mention it as something that's considered.
They don't mention it as something that's a bad idea.
They don't mention it as a good idea.
They act as if it doesn't exist.
Now, I think it was two days ago, I was watching Fox News show The Five, best show on television, in my opinion.
And Juan Williams plays the part among the five people as the voice of the Democrats, if you will.
So he plays that role.
And Juan said...
That climate change is a big issue.
I'm paraphrasing.
And that the current administration has no plan to combat climate change.
Well, Greg Guffeld says nuclear.
You know, he talks over and says nuclear.
Generation 4 nuclear. The administration is in favor of nuclear.
Now, what did Juan do when...
Greg answered the question.
I think maybe Jesse Waters may have said something, maybe Dana Perino.
I'm not sure who was talking, but it was like a little chorus saying, nuclear.
The administration does have a plan.
They're supporting nuclear.
That is the only solution.
Now, they didn't use those words.
Those are my words. But what did Juan do when he said they have no plan And then, immediately, he was told what the plan is.
Now, I think plan is overstating it, but it is true that nuclear power...
Now, people are telling me that I'm frozen, but last time, that didn't seem to be true.
So, some of you might be trolls.
All right. Is there a latency?
Uh... It's back.
Okay, so it seems to be back.
So as I was saying, that when Juan Williams mentions the administration has no plan for climate change, several others, Greg Goffeld notably, quickly mentioned, yes, nuclear, they back nuclear.
What was Juan's response to To being proven wrong or at least shown a counterpoint that is very important.
How did Juan respond to that?
Here's the fun part.
He acted like it didn't happen.
He acted as though nobody had said words.
That nothing was happening.
He just paused a little bit and then continued talking without mentioning it.
Now, I just read a whole bunch of articles on climate change without even mentioning nuclear as an option, even to eliminate it.
And then I watched Juan hear nuclear and act like the words weren't happening, like there was nothing happening, just literally like there was nothing happening.
He didn't respond to it.
He didn't debunk it.
He didn't agree with it.
He acted like there was no noise in the room.
Like a ghost that got his attention, but there's nothing there.
I have a theory that this might be another one of those cognitive blindness situations where it doesn't matter how clearly you tell somebody something, how important it is, how obvious it is, how big it is, that they're just blind to it.
So... So watch for that.
Watch for how anybody talking about climate change, if you mention nuclear, watch what kind of reactions you get.
Now, in person, you might get a reaction that's more like, oh, I'm afraid of it and it'll melt down and stuff.
Then you could mention that Generation 3, which is the kind they have in France, I guess we have a few in the United States, have never had a problem.
The old technology has had some notable problems.
Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.
So old technology has had problems.
Generation 3, of which there are many, many plants in production for a long time, have never had one.
They've never had a major problem.
And Generation 4, which is starting to come online, Almost can't have a problem.
It's designed so that if everything goes wrong, it just cools down on its own.
So for those of you who want to follow this, Mark Schneider started a web page to educate people on the nuclear option, especially for climate change.
For the world in general, but it's obviously in the context of climate change that we see this stuff.
So his URL Is gen4nuclear.com, G-E-N, and then the four is the letters I and V. So gen, I-V. nuclear.com.
And he'll be keeping that updated with stories and information and blog posts about this topic.
So those of you who want to stay informed or at least have a place to send people who don't understand it can send them to that webpage.
So I'll mention that some more times as the future goes on.
I saw an exciting thing from, I forget which research university it was, Only slightly changing the topic here.
Somebody has figured out how to desalinate, to take the salt out of seawater, to desalinate chemically.
Now, if that does not immediately strike you as a big deal, let me tell you why it's a big deal.
The only way we can desalinate now is by using a lot of energy.
So you've got to push water through a membrane, which takes a lot of energy, which usually makes it not economical in a lot of situations.
Or you're heating the water to take the steam, and you keep the steam, and you leave what's left, which would be the salt, which also takes a great deal of energy.
But desalinization, chemically, Doesn't take much more energy than pour stuff in, shake it up, pour stuff out.
Now, I've just simplified a several-step process because there's a bunch of mix this with this, wait a little while, do this.
But the point is that it all can be automated fairly trivially, it looks like, so that we might have a world-changing Breakthrough, maybe.
You know, it's always too early to say that, but it looks like, I mean, they can actually do it in the lab.
They'll show you the video. Look, we poured this in here, we did this, poured this in here, and here's your clean water.
So they can do it in a lab fairly easily with just, you know, gloves and beakers and some chemicals.
It's actually that easy.
So if this is true, and if it can be scaled up, It changes water forever.
You know, we'll have as much water as we want, anywhere we want it, forever.
I mean, it might even have an impact on climate change, because it seems though if you could get water economically anywhere near an ocean, You could probably reforest deserts.
You can do all kinds of stuff.
And the impact of droughts will be far less, so the impact of climate change, at least in one way, would help.
Now, will we ever run on the seawater?
Well, apparently not. If climate change keeps melting the icebergs, we'll have plenty of water.
We can suck as much water out of the ocean as we want.
We won't run out for a while.
All right, so that's some good news. Here's some more good news.
I saw a tweet that said some states, but apparently not all, have allowed pharmacists to dispense the opioid antidote called nalaxone without a prescription.
Now, naloxone is a drug you give to somebody who took too much fentanyl, for example, and it looks like they're going to overdose.
If you get to them while they're still alive and you give them this naloxone drug, it pretty much works every time.
I don't know if it's every time, but it's really, really effective for saving somebody's life.
It's so effective that in the states where they made it easy to obtain without a prescription, That's the only change.
The only change they made is that in some states you don't need a prescription to get this antidote.
That change alone led to this.
Opioid, fatal opioid overdose doses fell by an average of 27% in the second year after that change.
And after passing law and in subsequent years fell more to 34% less.
They cut the number of fatal overdoses By a third with a piece of paper.
They cut the number of fatal overdoses from opioids by a third with a piece of paper.
In other words, a law that says, okay, you don't need a prescription.
What are the other states doing?
Now, this is the perfect example.
I talk about this all the time.
The states are the laboratories for the country.
These states tried this.
It totally worked, as far as we know.
If there's something I don't know, we'd have to add that into the conversation.
But it looks like it's a home run.
Honestly, everybody should have a package of that in their home.
If you have anybody in your circle who has any risk of opioid addiction, if you think that there's a friend of your kid If you think there's a relative, you think there's a family friend, if you think there's anybody in your universe who might suffer from an opioid overdose when you're in driving distance, you want to have some of that stuff in your car.
You want to keep this...
I mean, if you get enough people who just happen to have it in their car, and I don't know if it can be stored in the car, but let's say it can.
Let's imagine it can.
Maybe you have to store it in your house because of temperature differences.
But if you could store it in your car, imagine that you're anywhere, and somebody goes into an overdose situation, and there's somebody with that drug nearby.
You could put it on an app so that people who have, just theoretically, I'll just throw out some ideas.
What if there are people who don't mind being tracked, but they can only be tracked by an app that tells you if they've got this drug with them?
And maybe it's anonymous, so you don't know the name of the person who's got it.
But let's say you can pick up your app.
And you can see that there are individuals in homes and cars that have the drug, and you've got somebody who needs it like right now.
Hit the app, there's somebody three blocks away, they stop what they're doing, they leave the lunch at the restaurant, they drive right over, give you the drug, boom, save a life.
So there's probably a lot that can be done with that drug if it's available widely.
Let's talk about...
Let's talk about Biden said that he wants free healthcare clinics for illegal immigrants.
And a lot of people are saying, no, we can't do that because it will cause people to move here to get free healthcare, I guess.
To which I say, I'm not sure that's so different than the current situation, is it?
Isn't the current situation that anybody who goes into the emergency room gets care?
It doesn't matter if they're legal.
So, I would say that this criticism of Biden, it's fun political criticism, but it's not real, because we are a country that gives health care services to people who can't pay for it.
So if you have some way to do that that's a little different, that's trivial.
Let's talk about the so-called ban on conservatives on social media.
David Horowitz was, I think, temporarily banned, or temporarily, not banned, I guess.
He was, what do you call it, got a little time out for something, but I think he's back.
Carpe Dunctum, meme maker to the president, and probably one of the more famous conservatives because of his memes.
He got a 12-hour suspension.
But here's the thing.
My understanding is that he got suspended for something that showed violence, showed the president in a humorous way, if I can say that, shooting people, shooting his critics or something.
And I think the argument is that that looked like it was suggesting violence or supporting violence, even though it was in a humorous context, and that that would violate their terms of service.
Now, here's the thing. Can you treat all of these situations like they're the same thing?
Because I don't know that they are.
I don't think that I have a big problem with if somebody does something to suggest violence, such as James Woods.
I think his problem might be that he didn't delete the tweet.
Is that why James Woods is still not back on Twitter?
Because he hasn't deleted it?
So I think that's part of the process.
If you delete your post, then your suspension times out and then you're good to go.
Should we treat these minor 12-hour suspensions about a specific tweet that does mention violence even in a comical way?
If that's the rule, and they're applying that to both sides, I don't know if that's the biggest problem in the world.
So we're being sort of led into this narrow ravine.
We're kind of led into a narrow ravine where we're being forced to treat all of these people like it's the same problem.
And it really isn't.
Some of them are just the terms of service doing what they say they will do.
And if it doesn't apply to the people on the left, well, obviously we all have a problem.
But if it does apply, or we can get it to apply, or with a little pressure, we can make sure it applies to both sides, I don't know.
Is that the biggest problem in the world?
I don't know. That's the good news.
I'm saving the bad news.
I just found out this morning, are you aware of probably, I think it's the biggest problem Trump supporting area on Reddit, and the subreddit is slash r slash the under space Donald.
So there are a few fake accounts that are close to that, but the big one where most of the Trump supporters on Reddit live is slash r slash the Donald with an underscore between the and Donald.
So what happened in the last 24 hours, I have on good authority and I've seen the documentation, they were removed from search engines on Reddit and Google simultaneously.
Did you hear what I just said?
The biggest Reddit group for supporting the president, remember Reddit, It's sometimes called the front door of the internet or something.
I mean, Reddit is gigantic.
Reddit just removed from their search results the main Donald Trump entity within Reddit.
Is that a coincidence?
Well, it happened at the same time Google removed them from their search.
Now, what did the Reddit group do?
Well, I'm sure there were individuals within any large group who were doing bad stuff.
No question about it.
But removing them from the search engines?
That's a new level, isn't it?
And it suggests, when you start putting all of the pieces together, it suggests that just maybe there's coordination involved.
Want to hear another one?
Recently, a few weeks ago, my traffic on Dilbert.com fell by about a third.
Just suddenly.
All the same time.
Boom. My traffic, which has been fairly consistent for decades.
Decades. At least two decades, my traffic has been about similar.
Just fell off a ledge.
And when we looked into it, all of the change...
It came from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn suddenly, and we don't know why, stopped sending massive amounts of traffic to Dilbert.com.
Now, LinkedIn, of course, is where business people tend to have their entities, sort of the business social media.
So you can imagine that Dilbert.com would be very popular on LinkedIn, and it was.
Now, I don't know why We can't, you know, my partners and I, and this at the publishing and syndication company, they're web people and they're people looking at the analytics.
We don't know why. And I also don't know that there's any way to find out.
So, given that Dilber.com holds my blog and my blog post My blog post has all of these periscopes on it, and my blog post.
Would we, under the conditions that we're seeing, where you're seeing people who support the president being one by one picked off, and some of them they start with, you say to yourself, well, I can kind of see why this group or this person might be over the line.
But when you start to see how widespread it is, and by the way, let me say as clearly as possible.
Now, I'm watching to see if the people who say no audio are all the same people all the time.
Because I think the no audio people might be trolls who are just coming in to disrupt the Periscope.
Because I think we're entering the...
We're entering the presidential election season.
I guess we're really in it. So you can't really trust anything you see or hear on social media.
And you can't trust anything that happens on social media if it happens to be bad for you.
You can't assume that...
Yeah.
So let me find the person who is complaining.
Do-do-do-do...
You know, get rid of that person.
All right. All right.
So here's the question.
Under the current conditions, I have to wonder if LinkedIn made a decision because it could maybe algorithmically, maybe it wasn't a human decision, hard to know, but maybe it looked at the content on Dilber.com and stopped sending traffic.
Did that happen? I don't know.
So I've started pasting my comic on LinkedIn, which I hadn't been doing, to drive traffic to the website.
And I want to see if that even works.
And what I'm noticing is very few people actually see it.
So I have a feeling that my visibility might go down considerably in the next year and a half.
So watch for that.
I don't know exactly what to do about this, because social media is the only mechanism we have for complaining.
And if social media doesn't let you complain, you don't have freedom of speech.
Now, let me tell you who I'm most...
I have the least respect for this opinion.
When people say social media, they're private companies, they can decide what to do, you know, it's up to them.
It's a private company. It's not freedom of speech, because that's a government issue.
Private companies can do what they want, as long as it's legal.
Now, I ask myself, if the founders of the Constitution already had social media, If social media existed when the Constitution was being written, do you think they would have written it the same?
I mean, seriously.
Do you think that the framers of the Constitution, if they already had social media and they saw that it was the primary way people communicated, do you think they would have left that out?
I think the only reason it's not in the Constitution is because they didn't have an internet.
Let me put it in starker terms.
The Constitution was written for human beings.
The original Constitution was designed by human beings for human beings.
Since then, we have evolved into cyborgs.
By cyborg, I mean every one of you has a device.
You have a device that's your brain, your communication.
It's the way you relate to the world.
We're not really humans anymore.
Now, someday, thousands of years from now, historians will make the same distinction.
We'll say this was the era in which humans and technology merged for all practical purposes.
In a personal way, like my brain is with me all the time and will become more with me as the technology improves.
If, you know, Madison and Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution, if they knew that we would become cyborgs, wouldn't they have included some, you know, provisions for that?
Of course they would. So when somebody says, it's just the government, I say, you know, that was great when we were humans.
In the age of humans, the Constitution was pretty perfect.
In the age of cyborgs, I think you have to acknowledge that we're cyborgs.
We communicate through social media.
That's how we do it. There's not really a second way to do mass communications as a human being or as a cyborg.
All right. Did you see the bomb with the United States?
I guess it's a bomb or a missile?
I guess it's a missile. The United States has apparently been using a new kind of missile that they're calling the flying Jinsu bomb.
Jinsu, a play on words, or a reference to those Jinsu knives that are really sharp.
So it's a missile that they can target on an individual automobile.
And instead of blowing up, which would be bad for any innocent people who happen to be in nearby, as the missile comes down, just before it hits, it turns into a bunch of sharp objects and just falls like an anvil through the top of the car and just slices whatever is in the car into fine bits with no explosion.
And apparently we've been using this thing.
And I think to myself, that might be the scariest thing I've ever heard in my life.
Explosions are scary, but a flying Jinsu bomb that kills only the people in the car and literally doesn't hurt the kid who's standing next to it, that's some scary stuff.
So we're going to see a lot of that.
So I was making a temporary list here, which I'll probably add to, of all the things that Trump critics say when they've run out of materials.
Alright? See if these sound familiar.
So this is the long list of things Which Trump critics do and say when they've run out of good material.
Because the economy is too good.
Things are really good.
But they have to say something.
So these are from CNN mostly.
It's a dire situation.
It doesn't matter what the topic is.
It's a dire situation.
So you say that without details.
What about these trade talks with China?
It's dire. What about North Korea?
It's a dire situation. What about the president putting executive privilege over the Mueller stuff?
It's a dire situation.
The other thing they do is they complain that he didn't say things the way they would have said it.
He didn't say it the way I would have said it, and therefore he must be a Nazi or something.
They also do, he didn't say it soon enough, and he didn't say it the right way.
We know what he meant, we know what he was saying, but he didn't say it the way I would have said it.
That's it? That's your best attack?
He didn't say something the way you would have said it?
How about the what if?
Have you seen this one? People literally imagining stories in the future in which things went poorly because the president did something that he would never do.
So you'll see the pundits sit around and say, sure, there's no problems now, but what if the president decides to become a dictator and kills us all?
And I think, what if?
You could what if anything.
That's not a complaint.
It's a what-if. It's literally making up imaginary problems that are almost impossible in terms of likelihood.
Then, of course, they're reading his mind.
They'll tell you what he's thinking, what he's worrying about, what his priorities are.
None of it's in evidence, just mind reading.
They'll talk about the constitutional crisis, despite any evidence of that.
There's no evidence of it.
We're so far from a constitutional crisis, it's laughable.
But if you just throw it out there, it's like, yeah, we're getting close to a constitutional crisis.
And you can actually combine these things.
So you can combine the mind reading with the what if, with the generic terms that don't have any detail.
You'll say, huh, I think the president is thinking he wants to be a dictator.
What if he gets away with whatever he's trying today...
Then you've got a constitutional crisis.
So you add the mind reading to the imaginary what-if to the generic bad-sounding thing that doesn't have any reasons.
Constitutional crisis. I also heard that he has unsteady hands.
So in these negotiations, the president has unsteady hands.
What? What's that mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
He's got unsteady hands in a negotiation.
It sounds like it means something, but it doesn't actually mean anything.
There's no reason there.
They like to say that he wasn't joking when he was joking.
For example, it happened again last night at his speech.
Somebody in the audience yelled about shooting immigrants, and he just shook his head and smiled because it was a big...
Big crowd. He knew that the person saying it didn't literally mean it.
And he made a joke about it only makes sense in the panhandle where he was.
And of course, his critics say, oh no, I think he meant that.
I think he was okay with shooting people.
Because they don't have a sense of humor.
Here's one. He disdains the principles and pillars of the American government.
Does he? I don't think so.
That is mind reading.
And if he asked the president, hey, Mr.
President, and you put a, you know, let's say you put a truth serum in him so he couldn't lie.
You say, what do you think of the Constitution?
Which of course is the principles and the pillars of the country.
I think he'd be okay with the Constitution.
I think he'd be okay with being good to people.
I think the president would be okay with capitalism.
I think he'd be good with all of the pillars and principles of the American government.
But if you're talking about him personally, he's going to push things as much as he can.
He's going to push the envelope.
But I'm pretty sure he doesn't disdain the principles and pillars of the American government.
They like to call this hyperbole lying, as if the lies that they tell on the left are equivalent to the 10,000 alleged lies that the president has told, 25% of which are probably made up.
When the president departs from, let's say, technical accuracy, he does it in a sales way.
In other words, he's trying to sell the country something that's good for the country.
When the president lies, as they would say, and his supporters would call it hyperbole, or they'd say he's not lying, that some of it is actually right, When he does that, whatever you want to call it, he's selling something that is unambiguously good for the country.
He's selling the economy so people trust it and they invest and it goes up.
He's selling our success against our enemies so that the enemies will feel more defeated.
It always has an obvious beneficial outcome for the people he's talking to.
So he's selling people something they want.
You can call it a lie, but I don't think you don't want it because he's selling you things you want.
Now, when the Democrats lie about him, as they do with the fine people hoax, which Kamala Harris once again lied to the public and said that the President of the United States called the neo-Nazis fine people, which is the opposite of what he said.
It's well-proven, well-documented, PolitiFact, Wikipedia, Wall Street Journal, they've all confirmed what I just said.
But is that a beneficial lie?
Because that lie tears the country apart.
That lie puts us at each other's necks.
That lie makes us less stable as a country because we're at each other instead of being against common enemies.
So I don't think you can compare The way the president uses hyperbole with how the Democrats make up lies that could destroy the whole frickin' country.
The Russia collusion lie could have ripped apart the entire country and has certainly made it less easy for the president to operate.
So you can't compare sales hyperbole of things that people want to buy We're doing things that could rip apart the entire country and destroy the planet.
Those are not similar.
Not even close.
All right. Here's what else they say.
They say that Trump is on the wrong side of history or his supporters are on the wrong side of history.
What's that mean? Well, it's one of those things you say when you don't have good reasons.
Well, I don't have any reasons, but I think you're on the wrong side of history, because it's sort of a general bad thing.
They say he has a refusal to comply with long traditions.
That's why he was elected.
He was elected because he has a refusal to comply with long traditions.
There's nothing that people like, his supporters anyway, there's nothing they like more about this president than his failure to comply with long traditions.
I want more of that, not less of it.
I heard that our forefathers are turning in their graves because of whatever the president's doing.
Really? Are the forefathers turning in their graves?
What's the problem? Why don't you mention the problem instead of just saying they're turning in their graves?
How about he's trying to be a dictator, despite all evidence to the contrary?
My favorite is, I think Michael Cohen really has something this time.
That might be my favorite of all things they say about the president.
I think this time, Michael Cohen has some good stuff.
This time. And, of course, we talk about the differences in words.
Was there spying or was it just investigating?
Is he exonerated or is there just insufficient evidence for a crime?
And then I also heard that American democracy is on the brink.
Is American democracy on the brink?
It is, but it's not because of this conversation.
American democracy, it looks like the second coup is underway.
Now, I'm not going to say for sure yet.
But when you look at the evidence about what happened at Reddit, you look at the bans, you look at what happened to my traffic, which may or may not be related to political reasons.
I don't know yet. It could be just something innocent.
But if you look at the totality of things that are starting to shape up, it looks like social media, working with the Democrats, have decided to win the election through social media.
By controlling the message.
I don't think that's an overstatement.
It looks like that's how it's shaping up at the social media platforms.
I'm not saying all of them, but it looks like at least some of them are shaping up to control the election.
Now I think the thing that...
The Democrats did not count on last time is what I call Moneyball.
Well, I didn't make up that term.
So Michael Lewis's book Moneyball talked about Billy being the coach of the A's way back when he would use statistics and data to To get the most out of players that other teams had overlooked.
So there were players who were not flashy, big number players, but if you look closely at their stats, they seem to be consistently good at winning baseball games.
So Billy Bean found a way to take all these misfit players that were not stars, but their statistics were really good, and then he could win that way at a low cost.
Trump used a similar strategy, which I don't know how intentional it was, or it just evolved that way, in which a lot of the Trump supporters are what I would call the island of misfit toys.
If you take me, for example, what category do I fit into?
None, right?
I mean, I'm literally left to Bernie.
But I'm supporter of the president in terms of his effectiveness.
And now that he's been president, he's unambiguously the best president we've ever had, in my opinion.
It's unambiguous. You know, if he left office tomorrow, it would still be the best presidency of all time.
So, where I'm going with this is that social media allowed...
People like me, people like Mike Cernovich, people like Infowars, and the three of us don't have that much in common.
You know, we're all very different people.
We have different missions, different philosophies, different everything.
But the only thing we have in common is, we're pretty, pretty good on social media.
We're pretty, pretty, pretty good on social media.
We're all misfits, crazy, we've got our flaws, you know, you wouldn't necessarily want to hang around with all of us.
It's a strange group of people who had this one common element that were unusually good on social media.
Carpe Duncan, perfect example.
Who is he?
You know, he's a guy in the Midwest, In his pajamas making memes.
But he's really, really good at it.
Now, he's not the guy you're going to see as the pundit on Fox or CNN. But when you put him in front of a computer, he's really, really good at it.
So, I don't see the same thing on the left.
Maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
Yeah, I am channeling Larry David intentionally.
Larry David says, he says, really, really?
He's got a saying that sounds like that.
So, this advantage that the President either evolved to or knew about, in which he could weaponize all kinds of misfits, and I say this with love, right, because I'm calling myself a misfit, the deplorables, if you will.
He could weaponize all these people who, if you looked at us quickly, you would assume that we were completely inert.
If you looked at any one of the people who became major forces in the election on social media, it didn't look like that a year before the election, or maybe two years.
It kind of surprised people.
So it seems to me that the Democrats have determined...
That they need to control social media and control the message.
That's the little bit of signals that we're starting to see, and I would expect if this is true.
And again, I'm going to stop short of saying it's true.
It could be nothing but the social media companies playing with their algorithms and catching more people on the right than the left at the moment.
Maybe it just gets adjusted.
So you could tell a story in which there's nothing nefarious going on here.
You can imagine a story where you say, okay, but James Wood did say something that people could have construed as violent.
And Carpe Duncton did do something that if you didn't know it was a joke, you can imagine some people would construe it as violence.
If that's all that's going on, there's no problem.
But it doesn't look like it.
However, I will give you this caution.
Confirmation bias and reality...
are indistinguishable.
The best way you can tell the difference between confirmation bias and reality is to see if your theory of the world is predictive.
If you see me get completely shut down on social media, it's very predictive.
Shutting me down should be somewhere in their top hundred things that they would want to do if they want to win the White House.
Now, so I would look over the next year.
My prediction is that if this is nothing but confirmation bias, that my social media presence will be completely unmolested.
Because it's very unlikely that I'm going to say something violent.
It's very unlikely I would even make a joke.
About violence. Because I don't like those jokes, and I actually think that they do present a worsening of the conversation.
So my preference is I would never cross the terms of service for any of these platforms because I don't want to.
There's nothing on the other side of the terms of service that is appealing to me.
There's no, you know, I'm not going to do it for fun, I'm not going to do it for kicks, I'm not even going to do it for effect.
Somebody's saying Chinese fentanyl executions.
Yeah, if you're asking for executions of terrorists, I think you're still safe on social media.
So if somebody said, hey, we should go drop some bombs on the Taliban, who just wiped down a platoon of Marines or something, I think you're still safe.
You know, you're talking about national security.
You're talking about people who are literally military enemies in an armed conflict.
You're pretty safe with that.
Likewise, the fentanyl dealers in China, they are terrorists.
And, you know, you can't treat them the same as saying, you know, suggesting that you should shoot immigrants or something like that.
That would be clearly a different standard.
Calling white men terrorists is still fair game, are you saying?
Well, I disavow that conversation.
Um... Trump lied and said Chairman Kim knew nothing about Otto.
Well, I don't know where that comes from, but let me put that in context for you.
When President Trump says that he believes Putin or that he believes Kim Jong-un or that he believes President Xi, that's not to be taken literally.
If you're taking it literally, I don't know how to help you.
It's obvious to me that the president's strategy, and it seems very clear, he said it in pretty clear language, his strategy is to treat the leaders with respect so that when he negotiates with them, he can go as hard as we need to, and it doesn't become personal.
The president has depersonalized our negotiations, which is probably the most important thing he's ever done in the world.
So that thing that you're criticizing them for might be, and I think historians will look at it this way, one of the greatest innovations in diplomacy, probably the most effective thing that's ever been done diplomatically.
Absolutely essential. And I would go so far as to say that if a future leader doesn't do what he's doing, which is give their leader the benefit of a doubt, because that gives their leader flexibility.
If you insult the leader, he's got to act on the insult.
They don't have an option.
If you're a dictator and the President of the United States treats you disrespectfully, you can't go make a deal with him.
It's not an option. If we want to deal with these people, and that's what we hired the President to do, we want him to lay in a little BS whenever it's going to be useful for the United States.
If President Trump standing with Putin and saying things that every person in the audience believed was not true, if that got him a little bit of respect mutually with Putin, Is calling that a mistake when we're negotiating hard, we're sanctioning Russia at the same time?
It's like you don't understand anything about human nature if you think those are mistakes.
So if he had done it with one leader once, you could say, my God, I can't tell if that's a mistake or a strategy.
You wouldn't really know.
But you've seen it now with Xi, you've seen it with all the leaders.
He has treated all of the leaders...
With a respect that is contrary to the facts that we think we know.
It's intentional.
It's effective. You wouldn't want him to go the other way.
Because that would be... The minute the president insulted any of those leaders, Putin, Xi, or Kim...
Now, of course, he started out that way with Kim, but that was sort of pacing and locker room banter that actually got us to a better place.
If you saw him disrespecting those leaders...
Even if they deserve it, that would be a serious, serious risk, and not one that this president is dumb enough to make.
He's smart enough to play it right.
And he's the smartest person in this realm that we've ever seen be president, by far.
There's nobody who comes close to him for this stuff.
You can criticize him for other stuff, but when it comes to dealing with the leader's Of our, let's say, our adversarial countries.
Unambiguously, he's the best.
Nobody's ever been this good as he has, as dealing with those personalities.
All right. I'm just looking at your comments here.
He only disrespects his own countrymen.
I don't know what reality you're looking at, but I'm looking at a president who won't criticize Americans unless he's got a really, really good reason.
He's not that willing to criticize people unless they're his critics.
And then, of course, he goes out of the heart.
Your plan to combat big tech, big tech meaning the social media platforms.
At the moment, it's sort of a wait and see to see if the prediction that the shadow banning and the search engine changes and everything on conservatives is real or imagined.
And I think we're still in the, this is really suspicious.
Let's monitor this.
So I'm going to be cautious on this because you don't want to get this wrong.
But I would at least suggest to you And I just want to put this out there, that if the platforms have this plan to hurt the people on the right by carving off the people who are the most provocative, depending where they stop the pruning, they could end up hurting themselves.
Do you see that?
Is it obvious to you?
That these social media companies, if they look at all the people that they say are on the right, and they pick the worst 5% and they ban them from all the social platforms, will that be good for the Democrats or bad?
Think about it. What's the biggest problem Trump has?
Vocal supporters who are too radical.
And then the Democrats say, hey, look, this guy's supporting the president.
He's terrible. If he supports the president and the president doesn't disavow him, the president must be terrible too.
You have to at least be open to the possibility that if the neo-Nazis, for example, get kicked off of social media, People suggesting violence, people who are just making up stupid rumors that even the people on the right don't believe.
If those are the only people who get kicked off of social media, your brand, the people on the right who are not kicked off, will improve.
Your brand improves every time somebody who really needs to get kicked off gets kicked off.
Now, your brand doesn't improve when Carpe Donctum gets a temporary suspension, but it also doesn't change the world in any real way.
It gets him some attention.
We get to talk about him.
He'll probably pick up users when he comes back.
No real effect.
And David Horowitz, I would say, is in the category of that would be too far of a reach.
Laura Loomer is a special case.
There's nobody quite like her.
I don't want to compare her to anybody else.
So that's a different situation.
All right. Nobody should ever be censored.
Well, I disagree.
I disagree.
I think that in the...
If you have a commercial product...
It would be completely ruined by Nazis if you let it.
If you like Twitter, if you like Facebook, if you like Instagram, those would all be just ruined by bad people if those platforms didn't put some control on it.
So I would say that there has to be some control, but if they go too far, I don't know exactly what you could do.
Because you can't really quit the platforms.
That doesn't hurt anybody. Except you.
So I don't know. Anyway, that's all I got for today.
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