All Episodes
Previous Next
May 24, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:02
Episode 540 Scott Adams: Slaughtermeter Reset to Zero Due to Social Media Manipulation, Pelosi
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, where is everybody?
Come on in here. Troy, Carl, grab your containers.
Beth, Duke, or Duke Fightmaster, Donna, Pat, I know you're all ready with your beverages.
Be it in a glass or a cup or a mug.
Could be a tankard or a chalice.
Could be maybe a thermos or a flask, but it doesn't matter.
Just fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous sip.
Oh, yeah. Good stuff.
All right. Well, we got a lot to talk about today.
You all know that I've been talking about what I call the slaughter meter.
The slaughter meter...
It is a measure of how the election will go and whether President Trump will win by a small slaughter or a large slaughter.
And I update it based on current events.
So it's not really a prediction.
It's more like a moment in time in which the current conditions If they were to continue until the end, it would give you that result.
But of course, things always change, so it's not a prediction.
It's just sort of a, if nothing changed, this is where you would end up.
I have downgraded the slaughter meter from 140%, where I said to myself, the competition for presidency is so weak that I couldn't imagine any situation other than Trump dominating the election.
I've reset that to zero.
So my current thinking is that the president has no chance of re-election.
Now, remember, the slaughter meter is as if nothing changes.
But of course things will change, so you don't have to worry that this necessarily will be the condition on Election Day.
But the current situation would give him no chance of winning.
And here's the current situation.
I'll just give you some anecdotes.
There is a topic that I can't mention that is removed from YouTube whenever an individual is mentioned in a positive light.
I can't even say the name of the person because these videos will be removed from the internet.
Now, I don't have much interest in that actual topic.
I don't even have an opinion on it and I'm not really informed.
But it is true that we now live in a world in which a major platform can completely stop a topic.
And it's okay.
It's okay. It's legal, apparently.
You can make an entire topic leave the news, and it's okay.
Now, in that world, can you ever expect a fair election where the social media people do not put their finger on the thumb?
Well, I would say that that's pretty unusual.
We see people like Dave Rubin being demonetized.
I'd say a hundred of my videos were demonetized.
If I ask the reasons for it, and I haven't, I'm sure there'd be some reason that didn't sound very convincing to me.
But the things demonetized, coincidentally, are the same things that would be the most damaging to the Democrats.
Might be a coincidence, but I don't know.
Now, as I've said recently, the fact that even with my resources...
I have lots of connections.
I know people who work at every platform.
I have the time.
I've got the will.
I have every resource you would need.
To determine whether I'm shadow banned or my sudden demonetization and lack of exposure is some kind of just a normal, you know, normal cyclical seasonal thing.
Who knows? The fact that I can't determine that and there is no mechanism for me to determine that means that there is no oversight on the most important lever of our democracy.
Think about this.
You know how much access I have.
I have a lot of access.
Everywhere. Just by virtue of visibility and the fact that I know a lot of people, I'm a certain age, I have a certain amount of money.
I have a lot of access.
And I have a lot of capability, both personally and people I could employ or ask for help.
And even I have zero visibility On whether my social media experience is being biased in any way by people who have their fingers on it.
Can't tell. And if I can't tell, nobody can tell.
Here's another one.
YouTube apparently removed what they call the doctored videos of Pelosi seeming to slur her speech.
The argument given is that it's a doctored video.
Just think about that.
What other videos are doctored to give you an impression that is not exactly what reality is?
I don't even have to finish the sentence, right?
If that standard holds, and it looks like it will, I don't see any pushback.
It looks like YouTube will be able to say, we think this video is, wait for it, misleading because of the way it's edited.
Now, of course, the video, there does seem to be some evidence that at least one video of Pelosi apparently slurring her speech was slowed down.
But here's the interesting thing.
The thing that started this all was probably somebody like Robbie Starbuck mentioning that the actual video, not the one that's edited, but the actual video, the real live unedited video of Pelosi talking about Trump and the infrastructure meeting, sounded like she was drunk.
Now, that's an opinion.
I'm not saying that it sounded like she was drunk to me.
I could easily see that she was old and tired and people slur, and it doesn't mean as much as we like to think it is.
But it seems that CNN and other entities are trying to conflate the videos that are doctored with the ones that are not doctored and send the same message.
The undoctored ones...
are just as compelling as the one they claim is doctored, but when they claim it's doctored, they don't show the undoctored one at the same time, at least on CNN's website.
I understand they may have shown it on the air at one point.
But if you say that this one is slowed down, and you have access to the real one because you're the news, if you're the news, you have access to the real video, it's yours!
If you don't show the full speed one on the same page as the slowed down one, what are we to make of that?
That's sort of a large oversight.
So consider the fact that YouTube could remove the video because in their editorial opinion, it was doctored.
That's pretty much every story about everything.
And you know what? I could give you an example of something else that was doctored video on a topic that if I even mention the topic, this video that I'm making right now will be demonetized once it's uploaded to YouTube.
It won't be demonetized on Twitter.
Think about that.
There's two topics.
There are two topics just today...
That are topical and involve just, you know, things that I would normally talk about.
And I can't even say the words.
Forget about text, forget about titles.
I can't even say the words.
Because if I say them, I'm worried that the speech-to-text thing will pick it up and I'll be demonetized.
Think about that.
In that world, Let me paint the picture a little bit more completely here.
Every day I hear from people who say they had to follow me on Twitter for the fourth or fifth time because they get unfollowed automatically.
If any of you have ever been unfollowed automatically, if you were following me, And you ever got unfollowed automatically so you had to go back and follow me again?
Say so in the comments.
I want to see if there are any other people out there who have that same problem.
And by the way, I don't necessarily think that's real.
I don't have an opinion one way or the other.
I do think that there's some amount of confirmation bias that would be very large that would make us think we're seeing things where there's nothing to see.
So, clearly, you have to account for the fact that a lot of it would be just in your imagination.
But I have somebody else saying yes.
So look at the yeses as they go by on the screen.
So, oh my god.
Okay, I didn't expect I would see this many yeses.
Holy cow.
Jack, are you watching this?
Look at the yeses coming by in the feed, the number of people who followed me and then got unfollowed, which is not really something that you would forget.
I mean, you'd remember it.
Holy cow, somebody said it happened two times.
Somebody says four times.
Somebody got unfollowed from me four times.
Same with following Dan Crenshaw, somebody said.
All right, well, So you can see the problem, can you not?
Now, again, I want to take it out of the weeds.
You know, the weeds here are whether or not I'm being shadow banned or something.
So that's the weeds. The higher level, which is the part we can focus on, because we can never really determine if I'm being shadow banned or it just seems like it or it's confirmation bias or it's system error.
We will never know.
My God, look at all the yeses.
I'm a little bit frightened by this.
Holy hell.
Are the rest of you seeing this?
Watch the comments. I'm a little bit speechless.
Okay, honestly, I thought I'd get two or three people saying yes.
I'm seeing dozens of people who just happen to be on this Periscope.
So, you know, it's filtered by...
People who happen to be on the Periscope, which is a very small population compared to my 315,000 followers.
Whoa! It has been videoed.
Some people have videotaped them following and then having it unfollowed.
Wow! Holy cow.
All right. I'm sorry, I was a little speechless there for a moment.
I think I may remain, but let me finish my point because this is all very relevant to it.
So, if you go back to pre-2016, the social media companies didn't see what was happening.
In other words, they may have been trying to put their finger on the scale a little bit, but the thing that the social media companies didn't see coming is what I call the island of misfit toys.
Trump supporters all over We're this weird collection of just weirdos and oddballs, and I would put myself squarely in the center of that population, because nobody really saw me coming,
right? Nobody really saw that cartoonists would start spending all this time talking about Trump's persuasion abilities, which would probably change thousands of votes.
I've actually asked people online, on a survey, how many people changed their vote from following me, and it was, I think, 1,500 people said yes, and that's just how many people, you know, assume that not many people saw the tweet, and not many people answered the tweet, and 1,500 people said yes, I voted for Trump because of following you, you said he was persuasive, and I like that, I like that framing.
Now, multiply me by all of the other misfits.
And I say this with love because I'm putting myself in this category.
There was this weird, spontaneous outgrowth of misfits who were unusually effective.
The thing about all the misfits, and again, I'm including myself in this group, is that many of the misfits We're super influential.
I was just going to say a name of somebody who would get me demonetized.
You probably know who it is.
But there are several names of people, whose names I won't even mention because I'll get demonetized, who were very, very influential in the outcome.
And I think it caught everybody by surprise.
Everybody thought Hillary would just waltz into the office.
But that surprise factor doesn't exist for this next election.
Consider, if you will, that Silicon Valley is, they're all about A-B testing and releasing a new version and continuous improvement.
Do you think that they're going to get caught off guard again?
There isn't any way that the platform owners will be caught off guard again.
They won't be caught off guard again.
This time, they're going to be prepared.
And they've had a lot of time to prepare.
Four years of the smartest people in the world trying to figure out how to hide behavior that nobody can find.
And keep in mind, it's not too hard to hide because there's no access.
Even I, with a tremendous amount of pull and resources, I have no visibility.
On whether my social media traffic is real or manipulated.
None. Can't tell.
And if I can't tell, you certainly can't tell.
Alright, so, here's the bottom line.
I've moved the Slogermeter to zero because the current situation is that the social media platforms do absolutely have enough influence to change an election.
Is there anybody who doesn't think that's true?
Is there anybody who doesn't think social media can determine the election if they were determined to do so?
I don't think anybody believes that, right?
It's clear what they want to happen, which is Trump losing.
It's clear they've had four years to fix their systems so that they're less obvious, more subtle, more effective.
Four years of technical development, the smartest people in the world Do you think they're gonna lose this time?
Maybe. I mean, anything's possible.
But I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I think you give the smartest people in the world who are super motivated.
How motivated are the social media platforms?
Not a little bit motivated.
Super, super motivated.
Smartest people in the world.
Know exactly the problem.
They know exactly the levers to move.
Four years to figure it out.
You think you're going to beat that?
You're not. So the current situation is that social media has the levers.
We can't see them.
They can push them. It's clear which way they're going to pull the lever.
No chance of the president winning this election under the current conditions.
So a lot of things would have to change for him to be really any shot because the whole democratic process is broken down.
I loved that the White House created that website where you can report what you believe is social media manipulation.
The trouble is, so many people are going to report social media manipulation, what can you do about it?
Some of them will be true, some not true.
It's just going to be this mess of data that may be kind of hard to be useful, but maybe they'll get something out of it.
Who knows? At the very least, they'll get a mailing list out of it.
Speaking of the White House, Brad Parscale launched the Promises Kept website.
If you haven't seen it, it's really well done.
So my comment is not just political in this sense, but the user interface and just the design of the website and really the idea of it, It's really, really good.
So, for example, there's just a search box where you can search to find out all the things the president has done.
On any topic. So I went there and said, healthcare.
Boom! It showed, I don't know, 20 different initiatives in summary form that you could find out more about that the administration has done for healthcare.
Things you wouldn't have known about.
So it's an amazing resource if you're arguing on social media and somebody says, he hasn't done anything on this topic, and you say, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Here's what he's done.
All right. Let's talk about...
I made a tweet yesterday that might end up to be my most viral tweet.
And I know it was effective because it activated the professional trolls.
If you don't know how to recognize the professional trolls, you just have to watch my account whenever I have a tweet that is insightful in a political sense and hits a nerve.
When that happens, apparently there's some kind of central source where all the trolls go in the morning to find out who to bother.
It's fairly obvious that they come in in waves, and they only come in when I say certain effective things.
If I'm just joking and I say something funny that gets a lot of retweets, nobody comes in.
But if I say something that actually looks like it could move the needle, reframes something, makes you think of something a different way, Then the trolls come in.
They tend to have cartoon profiles or animals.
So it's either a comic or an animal.
They always say the same thing.
They mock me for being a cartoonist.
Without talking about whatever the point is.
They say I'm stupid without saying why.
It's all the same.
They've got fewer than 300 followers.
And it's just obvious that they're not real people.
Or they're people pretending to be real people.
So, again...
I don't have any control over these trolls, and they probably think they're effective, but I don't know.
So let's talk about some other things.
So the slaughter meter is at zero because social media has their fingers on the scales, and there's no way that four years didn't make them effective enough to have any election that they want, or any election will come.
I keep seeing on social media Democrats pretending they don't understand why Trump won't show his tax returns.
And I don't know what to make of that.
Because I can't understand if they're actually that stupid.
Or if their news sources have failed them that badly.
Because they act as though, hey, if Trump won't show his tax returns...
There's only one explanation.
Only one. He must have illegal activities there.
To which I say to myself, seriously, that's the only explanation you can think of?
Because you don't have any news sources.
You haven't lived in the real world.
You haven't paid attention to anything that's ever happened in any news about politics ever since the history of time.
That's the one reason you can think of.
That's it. No other possibilities.
Nothing comes to your mind as some other reason why you might not want to release your tax returns.
Because I can think of a few and they're pretty darn good.
Would you, if you were Trump, would you release your tax returns knowing that they will be willfully misinterpreted and that people, the public, won't know the difference and they will believe whatever the heck people tell them are in those returns?
They're going to say stuff like, well, he lost money on this project.
No, it was probably a positive cash flow.
Will the public know the difference between a real estate deal that looks like it lost money on paper versus a real estate deal that's really, really good?
Because it's producing cash, at the same time it looks like a loss on paper.
Can the public tell the difference?
No, they can't. Can the public tell that anything on a tax return is normal versus abnormal?
No, they can't.
Showing his taxes would be the dumbest thing he ever did, no matter what's in those taxes.
All you have to know is that they're complicated.
Once you know they're complicated, you know that critics can turn them into anything they want, and nobody will be able to check because we're not smart enough.
Sure, sure, sure. On the other networks that they don't watch, people will say, oh, they're misinterpreting these.
I'm an accountant, and the way they say that what they say about these is not true.
The public isn't going to see that.
They're not watching those news sources.
They're watching their own silo, and in those silo, there will be one pundit after another who doesn't understand how taxes work, describing you all the crimes that they can see in his taxes that aren't actually crimes.
And by the way, the IRS never noticed.
So, I say this honestly.
I can't tell If the Democrats who are coming after me on social media about this, I actually can't tell if they're stupid or they're pretending to be stupid, like they can't see that possibility as being gigantically important to the country, like to the fate of the country.
The other thing they like to say is, That the president is not respecting the power of Congress for oversight.
So they're acting like, don't you know?
There must be oversight.
To which I say, what is the president doing that's against the law?
I'm pretty sure the administration is following the law, meaning that they're resisting They're saying why they're resisting.
They know that this will go to the courts.
It will go to the courts just the way the system is supposed to work.
And then the courts will make a decision.
And then almost certainly, everybody will obey the Supreme Court, I assume.
So, at what point is anybody not following the system as written?
It's okay for them to disagree.
That's exactly what the system is supposed to do.
We don't have a system where Congress gets everything they want.
We don't live in that system.
That was never designed that way.
You wouldn't want to live in it.
We have a system in which the executive and the legislative branch are in conflict sometimes.
This is one of those times.
It's built that way. Everything's working just the way the Constitution wrote it up.
If the Supreme Court said you have to do X and the administration decided not to do it, well, somebody probably has to get arrested.
Okay? But we're not there.
So, talking about Trump ignoring the powers of the legislative branch is not what's happening.
They're supposed to have conflict.
He is expressing that conflict.
The court might have to resolve it.
Business as usual.
There's nothing unusual here.
If you think that's the sign of a dictator, you're not paying attention.
All right. Let's talk about Assange.
The Assange story probably is going to go like every other complicated story, from the Mueller report to climate science to everything else that's complicated.
Which is that people will have strong opinions without knowing the facts.
And I put myself squarely in that camp.
I don't know if I'll ever have all the facts on Assange.
So I try to hold back a little bit from trying to figure out what my opinion is, because I feel like there's stuff I don't know, still learning it.
But the essential question is this.
Can Assange be guilty of a crime that is something that our regular press does all the time, which is publishing things that other people stole that were secret?
Maybe. But can you imagine being on that trial?
Can you imagine being in the jury?
Do you think you can find 12 jurors, jurors, Do you think you can find 12 who would unanimously say that Assange has to go to jail for doing something the New York Times does every day and nobody has a problem with it?
I don't think so.
I think, you know, the argument might be he's not a real journalist or whatever, but it's pretty clear that you're not going to get 12 people to say he's not a journalist or not, at least within that umbrella of activity.
So, I don't really understand that.
Now, you have to also put on top of that that he was asked not to, as I understand it, subject to fact-checking here, as I understand it, Assange was asked by the intelligence community not to publish the names of sources he did anyway, which caused people possibly to be killed.
Now, Nobody can be in favor of that.
I'm certainly not in favor of anybody getting killed because somebody published something.
It's the worst thing in the world.
So certainly no forgiving of that.
But can we ever make that a standard?
Can society operate if the standard is that the press is not able to publish things that might harm people?
Because I'm sure that the press is publishing things that could harm people every frickin' day.
Now, there are no two situations exactly alike.
So outing the names of intelligence people just sounds like the worst possible thing.
And you'll get no argument from me, that does sound like the worst possible thing.
But the regular press writes stories every day which could get people killed, and they do.
And it's stories in which you would know that you're exposing people.
In other words, if you do a story about somebody who did something terrible, the odds that that person will be abused by the public are very, very high.
Did we have a right to know that story?
Well, sure. Did the press have a right to report it?
Yeah, they did. Was any crime committed?
Nope, not really.
But did that story have the legitimate risk that you could clearly see in advance could cause somebody some physical harm?
Yeah, that's normal.
That's sort of how the news works.
It changes how people feel, it changes how people act, and sometimes it gets people killed.
So I don't know that...
We could never have that standard.
And so this is all leading me to the following conspiracy theory thought.
You ready for it? Before I say this, let me say in the clearest possible language, I'm not saying this is what's happening.
I'm saying you can't rule it out based on the evidence.
Here's what you can't rule out.
It almost looks...
Like, the government might have an intention of laundering Assange through the legal system so that he goes through the legal system and comes out the other side not guilty.
Why would they want to do that?
Well, think about it.
The best possible play is that you find out what Assange is willing to tell you.
But you don't give him a deal.
You can't give him a deal because the public cares too much.
He got people killed, allegedly.
I don't know if that's true, but allegedly he got people killed that we did not want to get killed.
He got patriots killed.
He's not an American citizen.
He did something They got American patriots killed, allegedly.
I don't know how directly or how true that is.
So you can't really just offer them a deal and say, oh, we'll let you go free.
Just give us some information.
That just doesn't work politically.
But what you could do is you could say, here's the deal, Assange.
We're going to push you through the legal system and we're going to charge you with things That no way in hell you're ever going to get convicted for.
Because there's no way in hell anybody's going to say the New York Times can do this, but you can't.
Some people may say it, but you'll never get a jury of 12 people to say it.
Likewise, the fact that somebody got killed because of it probably never could be a standard.
Because, again, New York Times and other news people have probably done the same thing, probably will do the same thing, and we recognize that as not a violation.
So, it makes me at least wonder...
If the big play here is to make a deal with him in which he does go through the legal system with risk, it's not risk-free, but the risk is low enough that it might be his best option, he might say, push me through the legal system, make sure that the charges are the kind no jury will ever find unanimity on, and in return, I'll tell you some stuff.
Maybe. I'm not saying that's for sure what's happening.
But I would say it would be compatible with the facts as we've seen them.
That's all I can say for sure.
All right. I had a tweet I was very proud of yesterday.
It said, I don't know if Pelosi is crazy, as Trump suggests.
That's his new nickname, nickname for her, I guess, crazy.
I don't know if Pelosi is crazy, as Trump suggests, but she did just start a public insult war with the best public insulter in the solar system.
So, that's kind of crazy.
Um... Now Trump, of course, was behind the tweeting of the compilation video where Pelosi looked like she was drunk, but that was the video that YouTube is claiming and experts are claiming was slowed down by 75%.
Let me ask you this.
If something was slowed down by 75%, wouldn't it be obvious?
Maybe not. I'm no expert on slowing down audio, but if that UC Berkeley expert was accurate and that video was slowed down 75%, I feel like I would have noticed that.
Don't you? They said 75% slower.
Now, he might have said, he may have meant as 75% speed, which I would believe.
I could easily believe I wouldn't notice 25%.
I don't believe...
I wouldn't notice 75%.
Somebody in the comments is prompting me to remind you that the slowed down videos, the ones who were allegedly slowed down, are actually different time and place than the original videos that are the recent ones in which she was talking about infrastructure.
And even at its normal speed, she sounded a little drunk.
So the news is trying to conflate them like it's all one thing, which it isn't.
All right. Let's talk about...
So Trump has issued a memo saying that Attorney Barr can release any documents relating to surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016.
That's good politics, but there isn't much else to say about it.
We have to see what we're going to see.
All right, let's talk about AOC and the President.
Both AOC and the President like to say that the weather, it tells you something about climate change.
And of course the weather doesn't tell you that.
AOC just got some pushback because she was talking about the tornado warnings and she said she blamed it on climate change and of course climate experts said no that's not necessarily climate change that's more like the weather.
President Trump does the same thing and it made me think it made me think you could probably solve a lot of problems by putting Trump and AOC in the same room.
Think about it. If you put Trump and AOC in the same room and said, all right, let's talk about climate change, they would probably both say, you know, I think nuclear has to be part of this, because AOC actually said that, and you know the president has no problem with nuclear that we know of.
The administration seems to be pro-nuclear.
So, we've got this gigantic problem where if you just took AOC and President Trump, put them in the same room and said, can you figure out this whole climate change thing?
They would end up with the same solution.
And it would be kind of fun.
From a simulation perspective and from the fact that considering that the government is now sort of a reality show, They can actually solve climate change in probably 20 minutes.
They just have to meet the two of them, get everybody else out of the room and say, look, you two, what would you do about this?
The president says, I'm not so sure climate change is a real problem.
AOC says, it's a big problem.
And then they realize that the thing you would do, whether it's not a problem or it's the biggest problem in the world, It's exactly the same.
It's exactly the same.
You would push every energy source that you could push as quickly as you could push it within the bounds of, you know, what's practical and affordable and everything else.
And you would do that whether climate change is a problem or not.
So those two in the same room could solve that in 20 minutes.
It'll never happen, but it's possible.
All right. I've got a theory I want to run past you.
I'll save this for the end because the people who are just tourists here have already bailed out.
I have a theory about why some people feel so strongly about this president.
Why some people seem to hate him with a A level of hatred that can't be explained by just the facts.
You know, it's typical that there's always two sides in politics, there's Democrats and Republicans, but the level of emotional hatred is off the chart, right?
And I have a theory, because I've been watching the people who have the most complaints with him, and I'm going to make a distinction here.
When I see Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer Talking about the president.
Do you get the sense that they are personally and emotionally bothered by him?
Because I don't.
I don't get that at all.
When I see Pelosi, you know, an experienced professional, or Schumer, an experienced professional, talking about the president, it's just politics.
I don't see any personal anything in there.
It just looks like they're doing business.
But when you see some other members of Congress talking heads on TV, they don't seem like that.
They do not seem like I'm just being a politician.
I'm saying things because this is what I do.
They seem like they've got real emotional hatred that seems out of whack with the situation.
Somebody mentioned Bill Maher.
I'll throw him in here, too.
Bill Maher has a very strong opinion, which I think is affected by the news, etc.
But I don't feel that he has an irrational opinion, meaning that he doesn't look like He's so emotionally invested, other than the fact I think he's had personal problems with Trump.
He just feels like professionally mad and maybe something personal because he and Trump had some issues.
Sam Harris does not seem crazy.
Sam Harris is a perfect example of somebody who seems like a rational person.
Well, he doesn't seem like a rational person.
Sam Harris is a rational person.
Who seems to be maybe influenced by the fake news to have maybe some, let's say, perceptual bias.
But here's the point that I've been taking too long to get to.
There is a group of Americans and a group of politicians who seem to have like a real emotional, visceral hatred that can't be explained by the facts and evidence that doesn't seem to affect people like Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer.
They all seem to just have opinions, which is fair.
There are a lot of people, and here's my controversial point, I believe a lot of people have experienced being bullied in their lives.
People who have maybe a certain appearance, That is non-standard.
I'm going to try to say this in the most objective ways without getting personal about anything.
If you see people on TV who hate the president and you look at them and you say, okay, I don't mean to be unkind, but that's probably a person who got bullied a lot.
The people who have been bullied seem to have the bully reaction to him.
Meaning that they feel bullied, they're reminded of being bullied, and it's triggering something really deep inside them.
So my hypothesis is this, that although there can be reasonable people on both sides of liking and disliking a president, just like reasonable people are on both sides of every other president, plenty of reasonable people, but there's a level of people Who seem to be in the I have been bullied category because of personal appearance, Could be anything.
And I'm not talking about being bullied by the president.
I'm talking about in their life.
Could be their ethnicity, their gender, could be sexual preference, could be anything.
But it does feel as though the people who have been most bullied in their life are reading all of that experience into the president because he does present himself as a big, insulting bully.
Now, there are people like me Who are largely immune to that personality type, meaning that my daily experience is people bullying me all day long on social media.
I was talking about that earlier, right?
Today alone, I guess a dozen people have come in to simply insult me personally.
They call me old and ugly and stupid and dumb and irrelevant and has-been and just a cartoonist and 500 other things.
So I get bullied all day long.
But... I also am a professional and none of it means too much to me.
So because bullying in my real life doesn't really ever get to the core of me, it just sort of washes off.
And I haven't had substantial, you know, I don't have any, let's say I have no scars from my past from being bullied.
I had bullies, but they met violent ends.
I've said this before, but when I grew up, it was accepted behavior to use violence against the bully.
And so in the few occasions that I had a bully, I employed violence.
And just like people said, it worked.
I don't recommend violence to anybody, anybody who's listening to it.
I'm just saying it was a time and place in the world in which you could be expected to use violence against a bully and everybody would be fine with that.
You wouldn't even get in trouble. Honestly, you would not even get in trouble.
For using violence against a bully where I grew up.
So I did. And it worked.
So I don't have any scars about bullies.
And it's probably why I can accept the president's personality as humorous when I completely understand if somebody had a lifetime of getting bullied.
Imagine this. If you take yourself out of the political model for a while, just for a moment, take yourself out of that model.
And put yourself in the head of somebody who had been bullied by people like Trump when it really mattered, when it really crushed them.
Could they feel okay about somebody who reminds them of it and indeed is bullying people every day?
I don't know. It's a lot to ask.
It's a lot to ask.
And I do recognize that people are being damaged by the experience.
I can tell you that my own impression of what the president would bring to the job is that the bullying is sort of part of the package I wanted.
Because it seemed to me that this president brought a set of skills, not unlike one of those movies, Taken.
You know the movie is with, what's his name, I can't remember, but the movie is Taken, where there's the guy who has a certain skill set of killing people.
This president offered a certain set of skills that included bullying people, that included pushing wherever he could push, that included using strength, yeah Liam Neeson, it included using strength against weakness.
And it seemed to me that we were in a point in the world in which that personality was exactly the right personality to solve a number of hard-to-solve problems.
Now, he might not be the right personality after those problems are under control.
You might need a certain personality to solve the hardest problems because somebody just has to be a bastard.
Sometimes somebody just has to be the bastard.
And I said, well, there's somebody who can be a bastard.
In fact, he's offering that.
He's saying it in direct language.
He didn't say this direct language, but effectively, Trump was offering to be the country's bully.
He was offering to bully China.
He was offering to bully Mexico.
He was offering to bully the Democrats.
And a lot of people said, you know, we could try that.
It might be just what we need.
And I was in that camp, sorry.
I snorted. But I do have great empathy for people who are experiencing this, which I imagine is quite traumatic.
So, I'm sorry, my cat's trying to ruin my whole program here.
Let's boo. So, this cat tail is definitely getting in the way.
All right. That's all I got for now.
I remind you that if you have not tried the Interface by WinHub app that my company makes, you should take a look at it.
If you go to winhub.com and you've already signed up for the mobile app, Interface by WinHub, that's free.
You can grab that code on onehub.com, search for your name, find the code that refers to you, stick it into your webpage, and you can have a button that people can connect to donate money to you, or to pay you for your time, or even to talk to you for free if you don't set up a price.
So if you want to do tech support or any kind of advising, the best way to do it is if you already have a social media presence, use that link or that button on your webpage.
So talk to your normal audience, and you can make money by inviting them to talk to you in person or to donate if you're doing something that makes sense.
▲
Export Selection