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Nov. 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

53:06

Episode 739 Scott Adams: Talking to Ben Askren, Y**Tube Alternative, #Shampeachment, Cartels

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	Hey everybody, let me get my wires set here.
	It's great to see all of you, and it's another amazing day.
	Another day to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
	Man, it's going to be good this time.
	It's going to be off the hook.
	Wild, I tell you. I'm going to bring on a guest in a little bit after he signs on.
	But first, before I do that, before we get to my special guest, I would like you to enjoy with me the simultaneous sip, and it doesn't take much to do it.
	It doesn't take much.
	All you need is a copper mug or a glass snifter, stein chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblin, vessel of any kind.
	Fill it with your favorite liquid.
	I like coffee. And join me now...
	For the unparalleled pleasure.
	The dopamine hit of the day.
	The thing that makes everything better.
	The simultaneous sip.
	Go. Oh, yeah.
	Yep. I can feel it coursing through my body as we speak.
	Uh-huh. It's getting to my extremities.
	Yes. Full caffeine exposure.
	Oh, I'm so happy.
	Now... Let's see if my guest has found me.
	Yes, he has. Let me bring him on, technologically speaking.
	And I'm going to bring on a guest, Ben Askren, retired UFC and MMA fighter, who's going to be talking to us about none of that, but something more interesting, an alternative to YouTube.
	Now, you might wonder why I would want to talk about an alternative to YouTube, but you may have seen my tweets already.
	That Senator Ted Cruz actually retweeted this morning, or last night, in which I talked about how YouTube is suppressing my views and monetization.
	And I thought it was time to talk about some alternatives.
	And so...
	Ben, are you there?
	Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me?
	I can hear you fine.
	So Ben, you are part of a startup.
	Can you tell me about that?
	Well, you know what?
	I'm not technically part of the startup, right?
	I don't have ownership in the company.
	It's my friend who founded a company called Flow Sports in 2007.
	It's gotten really big.
	He branched off and started something called Rockfin.
	But really what I think we need to talk about, and actually I think it's unfortunate that Ted Cruz I think it doesn't need to be politicized.
	I did hear from David Pakman who had exactly the same situation and he's as left as you can get.
	So it definitely wasn't a left and right thing.
	It was more like a lower level people talking about politics versus the CNNs and the MSNBCs.
	I think it was that. Yeah, and so I don't know why every issue has to be politicized.
	I'm not smart enough to know whether YouTube is censoring conservatives more than liberals or anything to that matter.
	But since Martin started his company called Rockfin, that's R-O-K-F-I-N for you guys wondering.
	Him and I, really good friends, had a lot of conversations, and he's gotten me to see the greater light.
	A lot of people talk about this, and there are a few alternatives out there trying to do something about it, but the power of balance between these large media networks and their content creators is such that, Scott, I mean, someone as big as you, and you're kind of a big-time guy.
	You're, you're literally witnessing them taking your money away and there's not anything you can do about it.
	You can't say anything to them.
	You can't say, no, give me more.
	I'm out of here. And that, that in itself is what the biggest problem is.
	So what, what does Rockfin do?
	And it's, it's, is it, is it up and running?
	Yeah, it's been up and running.
	I believe it was April.
	I think it was six, six months since he got up and running.
	So, Well, I'm going to try to explain it really simply, but, you know, it tries to accurately reward the content creators because the content that you provide to the network is not just valuable today, but infinitely valuable into the future.
	So, for example, the first thousand people on YouTube which got YouTube started, they...
	Looks like we lost our connection, so I think you'll probably get back on...
	Let me fill in a couple of details that he probably would have gotten to.
	So you probably know that there are alternatives such as BitChute.
	And one of the big issues with any alternative to YouTube is if you create an alternative to YouTube and the reason you're doing it is because a lot of people are getting banned on YouTube, you've got a problem because all you'll get is the people who are banned.
	And if all you get are the people who are banned, Ben, I'm coming back at you.
	If all you got were the people who are banned, you wouldn't have much of a platform.
	Ben, you're back. Let me refocus you here.
	So rockfilm.com is an alternative to YouTube.
	Where did I get cut off?
	Because I was just babbling over here, and I have no idea what happened.
	Yeah, we just had a technical glitch.
	But anyway, rockfin.com is up and running.
	It's an alternative to YouTube.
	The question everybody's asking is, what's the difference between that and BitChute?
	Okay, so I can't speak to BitChute because I don't know what it is.
	Here's what Rockfin does. It's so unique that Martin, who's the creator, he's applying for a bunch of patents.
	Hey, Ben? Ben, let me help focus you.
	My audience has a very short attention span.
	Tell me not in conceptual terms.
	I'm a user.
	I get on this system.
	Why is my experience as a user better in concrete terms?
	As a content creator, user experience is better because on an everyday basis you get paid in a token.
	Which, at that time, you can exchange immediately for a U.S. dollar, of course, or if you decide to hold the token...
	Did I lose you again?
	We got cut off again.
	Okay, so where he was going on this is that there's a crypto token component to Rockfin, So apparently you get an option because you get the token first, you can cash it in immediately and get cash, or you can hold it, and if Rockfin is more successful, and if you're more successful, I believe that makes your token worth more.
	So you'd have more of an upside.
	You'd be getting these tokens, and you could sell them right away, or you could ride it on the upside.
	So I think that's the basic idea.
	Now, as you heard earlier, Ben is not a founder of this startup.
	He's just got an interest in it.
	It's a psychological interest.
	It's a friend. But I wanted you to know about it.
	And if I can't get him back, we'll take one more try.
	Let's see if we can get it back and wrap up here.
	All right, Ben. We only have another minute or two.
	God, how do I keep from getting cut off on this feature?
	This is crazy. It just keeps cutting me off.
	Yeah, I don't know if it's really the Periscope app or we're just getting a glitch in our communications.
	But anyway...
	Okay, so let me just finish one thing that I think is different than other networks then.
	Things like Substack and Patreon, they're applying similar principles, obviously without a token.
	But in that case, it's one individual.
	And so they call it the Rockford Subscription Consortium.
	So essentially, you're not by yourself and you pair up with a whole bunch of other people, which makes it infinitely more valuable when you can do something like that.
	Alright, Ben, nobody understands it at a conceptual level.
	The only way we'll understand it is, I'm a user, I put a video on there.
	How is my experience different from if I put a video on Bitshoot or a video on YouTube?
	I can't comment on Bitshoot on YouTube.
	I think if you don't see the problem with what's happening with your lack of monetization, then I guess I can't really help you.
	The fact that YouTube has so much power over you and you literally have no recourse to do anything about it, I think that should provide kind of alarm signals to you.
	But that would be true with every platform.
	Every platform owner Who would have ability to kick anybody off the platform?
	So on Rockfin, if you get kicked off for whatever reason, you don't deal with the terms of service, then you keep all of the emails that are attached to your account.
	So obviously you keep a personal relationship with your customer, which is also something that the large digital networks don't want you to have.
	Scott, you don't have everyone's email who's following you on YouTube, of course.
	True. So that would be good.
	But if you got kicked off, you'd still be kicked off.
	Correct. I think you gave me a preview.
	The things you would get kicked off were not for just being a conservative or being a liberal.
	You'd have to go full Nazi to get kicked off, right?
	Yeah, I sent you the terms of service yesterday.
	It literally spells out some examples.
	White supremacist, you're out of here.
	Nazi, you're out of here. No pornography.
	Something like Twitter, they kick off Well, Ben got cut off again, but Ben, if you can hear me, thank you so much. That's what we wanted to get out of that.
	People will go and take a look at themselves, so go to rokfin.com if you want to see an alternative.
	Now, I want to say again that First of all, thank you to Senator Ted Cruz.
	It's always great to wake up in the morning and find out that one of the most prominent senators in the country just retweeted your tweet because he thought the issue was worthy.
	And it's the issue of people being demonetized and especially conservative voices being demonetized.
	Here's my take on what's going on.
	And this is just speculation.
	Alright? So I don't want to say this is a conspiracy theory.
	This is pure speculation.
	So I'm not asking you to believe it.
	I'm just trying to understand my world and thinking it aloud.
	If I were YouTube, And it looks like what they're trying to do is continue to evolve upscale so the content on YouTube is more like a television show quality.
	So they're de-emphasizing things of lower production values in favor of things with higher production values.
	Now, David Pakman, as I mentioned before, was also impacted the same way I was and we're pretty much opposites on a lot of stuff.
	So it wasn't the political leaning It was the fact that we were low-level production political talk.
	I think that's the key that's getting us put in the same bin.
	Now, here's why this actually is not completely fair.
	If you were to remove from YouTube the independent voices, both on the left and the right, what would be the result of that?
	Do you see it? If you get rid of the independent voices on the platforms like the social media platforms, but YouTube in particular, what would that do with what's left?
	Well, what's left is overwhelmingly mainstream media plus a little Fox News.
	So it seems to me that the net effect of getting rid of the, let's say, the lower production value Thank you.
	Thank you. Is that a side benefit to YouTube just wanting to get a higher production value?
	I don't know. But I will tell you that there are a lot of people like me who believe that they got on YouTube because YouTube had a certain set of rules and opportunity, and it feels like they changed the rules after we got there.
	Now, as a trained economist, In case you didn't know that.
	One of the worst things you can do in an economic system is change the system midstream, unless you're really fixing it.
	In this case, it's a change that was good for YouTube, presumably, but certainly not good for many creators, such as myself.
	So, anyway, enough on that.
	Have you heard the story that Nunes is being accused of By an indicted Ukrainian that he went over and met with Shokin over in Ukraine and tried to get dirt on Biden.
	Now, what I tweeted when I saw that is, when you can't find an anonymous source to make a claim, your next best choice is an indicted Ukrainian.
	Because if you want the truth, you really want to know what's going on, Talk to an indicted Ukrainian because you can depend on them to give you accurate information.
	So I'm not too worried about any stories about Nunes that originate from an indicted Ukrainian.
	In fact, if you wanted to, if you were doing a comedy routine, In which you were trying to come up with the least credible witness that you could ever imagine, you'd brainstorm and you'd say, alright, let's see, I'm writing a story and I need a character who's the least credible human being on the planet.
	What could it be? Maybe an indicted Ukrainian?
	That would be a good choice.
	In other news, the United Kingdom is pushing for the UN to have access to, I think it's Xinjiang.
	I don't know how to pronounce it.
	It's the area where the Uyghurs are being rounded up and put in concentration camps.
	It is one of the big three holocausts going on in China.
	One of the holocausts is they're rounding up the Uyghurs and assigning rapists to their wives.
	I'm not even making that up.
	You know, that was in the news, that the state of China is assigning a rapist for the wives left behind when they rounded up the men and put them in concentration camps.
	So that's the allegation.
	The other, as you know, the other holocaust is they're harvesting the organs from the full-on Falun Gong folks, practitioners.
	And of course, they're sending fentanyl over here.
	So will the UK be successful in getting UN monitors to go see what the Uyghurs are up to?
	Not a chance.
	Let me ask you this.
	If you were China and you were not running a Holocaust, would you let people come take a look to make sure that everybody was sure you were not Involved in a Holocaust?
	I think you would.
	I think if you were not involved in a Holocaust and people said you were and all you had to do to prove you're not is to say, what do you mean it's a Holocaust?
	Come on over. I'll buy you a ticket.
	Bring your cameras.
	Come talk to them.
	There's no Holocaust. Find me a Holocaust.
	There's no Holocaust here.
	That's what you do.
	When you're innocent. What do you do when you're actually perpetrating a holocaust?
	You say, get out of here UK, stop bothering us, and no, the UN doesn't have any right to come and check us out.
	Stop bothering us in our sovereign decisions.
	That's what you say.
	So, Is it confirmed that there is a Holocaust of the Uyghur community?
	I would say yes. I would say that there are China's denials of anybody to come in and take a look.
	It would be one thing if an individual country wanted to come in and take a look.
	By asking the United Nations to take a look, if you say no to that, you've got some explaining.
	All right? In other news, the president and the administration have said that they're looking into, and they plan to, it's just a long process, designate the Mexican cartels as terrorist groups.
	How about that, huh?
	Now, the main reason that you want to designate them as terrorist groups is so you can go after their banking relationships.
	And smart people are saying that that will make a big difference.
	I don't know. What's going to happen to the price of Bitcoin?
	I'm going to check that today.
	In theory, if you announce that you're going after the banking relationships of the cartels, what we should expect is a response, and we should expect that Bitcoin would be up, up 2.2% this morning.
	I don't know if that's cause and effect.
	But if you take the banking relationships away from the cartel, where are they going to put their money?
	Crypto? Maybe.
	So, and I don't know if the government can actually track down crypto stuff these days.
	Maybe they have a way, maybe they don't.
	Anyway, that's good news.
	Now, it doesn't necessarily mean Yeah, as somebody's saying in the comments, a 2% move of Bitcoin is just in the noise.
	You know, Bitcoin can go up and down, you know, 8-9% a day without any effort.
	So what we'll look for is to see if the moves are mostly up based on that.
	But I don't know. Maybe the cartels don't have enough money to make a difference.
	Although that seems unlikely.
	So... So designated the cartels as terrorist groups does not necessarily therefore give us military options.
	I think Congress probably still has to get involved.
	I don't know what the president can do on his own legally in terms of combating the cartels without Congress on its side, but this is a big deal, I think.
	It looks to me like a big deal.
	I think we're getting serious now.
	Smart people have also warned that if we do get serious with the cartels, especially if we get serious in a military way, that there will be blowback.
	They're not going to just roll over.
	They're going to go completely savage on innocent citizens.
	Americans will be kidnapped and tortured.
	It's going to get really ugly.
	But at the moment, I don't think it could get much worse.
	Now, I would like to suggest that if you want to take the cartels out, designating them as terrorist groups is a good start.
	But I would also, we need to take a look at legalizing their product.
	We have to look at legalizing the drugs that are being shipped from Mexico and, you know, wrapping those users in some kind of a protective medical, you know, wrapping, if you will. So I think we have to legalize because we're out of options.
	So even if we were to go in with the military and wipe out every cartel member, it would take about 10 minutes before there was another fentanyl path into the United States.
	So if you really want to take them out, you've got to make their stuff legal and take away all of their options.
	Now, you could make it all legal and still wipe them out, but I don't see any point in wiping them out other than revenge, which I'm in favor of.
	So we'll see what happens there.
	All right. Melania went to an event in Baltimore, I think, a youth summit on opioid awareness.
	And the news is reporting that she got booed.
	She got booed by the youth at a youth summit for opioid awareness.
	I just don't know what to say about that.
	First of all, Melania...
	Melania is not Trump, not Donald Trump.
	Melania is Melania.
	And is there anything that Melania has done since we became aware of her as the candidate's wife, is there anything that Melania has done that isn't just positive?
	I mean really.
	You know, if anybody deserved some kind of a medal, it's got to be Melania, because not only does she put up with her husband, but she does it with class and grace and completely just one of the best first ladies we've ever had, I would say. So the fact that she gets booed when she's just trying to help, keep in mind, she didn't run for office.
	If she's at an opioid awareness summit, it's because she's just trying to help.
	Just trying to help.
	Like, there's no politics on opioids.
	There's nobody on the other side of this issue.
	Booing her over that, that's just something wrong with the country there.
	All right. CNN has magically produced a new poll saying that That impeachment is still at 50% approval.
	So because the news was working against CNN, the other news was saying that an other poll said that there was less support for impeachment after the hearings.
	What do you know? CNN comes up with a new poll.
	Quite coincidentally, says that impeachment is still just as popular.
	It's not more popular.
	So the impeachment hearings did not make it more popular, but it's exactly the same as before the hearings.
	Isn't that a convenient, convenient poll for CNN? Do you believe that one?
	I'm going to say no on that one.
	So Buttigieg has surged into second place in at least one CNN poll.
	I'm not sure the other polls are going to back that up yet, but it looks like Buttigieg is really making a play for it.
	Now, I would like to run by you a Joel Pollack hypothesis that I find very compelling.
	Joel Pollack of Breitbart had this thought on Twitter, and it goes like this.
	Actually, I think he had an article about it.
	It goes like this.
	There are so many candidates running for Democrats, the Democratic nomination, and nobody seems to be getting a dominant purchase on the nomination.
	Who also could win in the general election?
	So Biden has the highest poll numbers, but nobody thinks he could win in the general.
	Sanders and Warren would destroy the economy and could not win in the general.
	And they were one, two, and three.
	Now, Buttigieg is surging up into the top, maybe second, depending on how the polls shape up.
	But Buttigieg has an African-American problem, which makes him...
	Probably unelectable in a general election.
	So what do you do if you're the Democrats and you go into the convention and nobody who could win has a dominant position?
	Let's say you do the first round of votes and there's no decision.
	Now, I'm not an expert on the new rules about superdelegates, etc.
	But my understanding is if you don't get If you don't get a clear result in the first round of voting, I think it's after the first round, then the delegates are released.
	In other words, they can negotiate and they can work out a deal behind closed doors.
	Now, what would happen if the Democrats and, let's say, the superdelegates can't work out a deal?
	Somebody in the comments just said, I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message.
	Yeah, you know where I'm going on this.
	If it's a brokered deal, they're going to broker the candidate.
	They're going to end up with a candidate who the smart people in the party, the people with the money, the people with the power, the Democrat, the bigwigs, whoever the candidate is, if it's brokered, is going to be somebody who could bring together the So-called Obama coalition.
	Because that's how you can win as a Democrat.
	And who could do that?
	Right. Kamala Harris.
	Now, Kamala Harris' policies still look a little sketchy.
	She'd have to work on her policies.
	But that's not unusual.
	It's not unusual that To have to, you know, how to modify your policies toward the middle or something if you become the candidate.
	So do not rule out that Kamala Harris is in the strongest position already.
	Because keep in mind that she has the second most endorsements from important Democrats.
	And apparently that's a pretty predictive, a pretty predictive thing.
	Well, no, I don't see anybody outside of the group of Democrats getting nominated in a broker convention.
	You know, anything can happen, but I think that there would be a revolution in the party if somebody who is not even running got nominated.
	I think that would be an internal revolution, and they couldn't survive that.
	I didn't mention Bloomberg because I don't think that the party leaders...
	I feel strongly that he could win in the general election.
	But I think they might be able to turn Kamala Harris into a good candidate.
	Well, let me tell you this.
	What is Kamala Harris' biggest problem so far?
	You probably have different answers to that, but I'll give you my answer.
	The biggest problem with Kamala Harris' campaign so far is her campaign staff, in my opinion.
	Because it looks like she had been getting terrible advice, just terrible advice about how to run a campaign.
	What happens if you become the national candidate?
	If you become the national candidate, suddenly you've got money, but you also have the best advisors that the Democrats can come up with.
	Does Kamala Harris have the best advisors now?
	She does not.
	Probably not even close.
	But if she were the candidate...
	If she became the candidate in a brokered convention, the fixers would get busy fixing her.
	She would be scrubbed up and polished by the people who are really good at it.
	Now, we would assume that in order for her to get the nomination, she'd probably have to agree to help.
	She would have to agree that the party would take a role in shaping her message and her candidacy.
	But I think she could do that.
	I think that she would be flexible enough and she's smart enough that she could learn and sort of grow with the party.
	So I'm going to stick with my original bet on Kamala Harris based on the Joel Pollack theory that if it goes to a broker convention, You're going to end up with somebody who's not in the top four necessarily.
	And once you're after the top four, only a few choices.
	And only one of them has a realistic chance of getting the coalition.
	You could say Cory Booker, but there has to be some reason that he's not getting much purchase even within the Democrats.
	He's just not lighting anything on fire there.
	So I don't know that they could change that.
	Oh yeah, and we heard the theory yesterday that the reason that Bloomberg might be a candidate as opposed to just putting his money in to hurt Trump is that as a candidate he gets lower prices for advertising.
	I don't know how that works, so don't take it from me.
	It's just something I heard on Fox News yesterday, that there's something about being a candidate that gets you some economic advantages, and they're pretty big ones.
	So maybe that's why he's running.
	All right, so if you've been noticing the two movies on one screen situation about impeachment, over on CNN there are a whole bunch of bombshell happenings, and these new bombshell happenings on impeachment are definitely, definitely going to take this president down.
	It's a lot of new stuff.
	It's very damning for the president, and he's really in trouble now.
	That's on CNN. If you click over to Fox News, do you know how they're covering that stuff?
	They're not. They're not even covering it.
	I don't even know if they have an article on it.
	It's so uninteresting that Fox News just looked at it and said, eh.
	But on CNN, it's the beginning of the end.
	And I want to give you some of the language, because this always amuses me, how CNN can make something sound like more than it is.
	So the basic new news is, if I can get this right, is mostly about timeline stuff.
	So we know now that when the president was quoted as telling whichever one of the diplomats, Sondland, he told Sondland that he didn't want any quid pro quo.
	But we know now that that was after he already knew that he was going to get accused of a quid pro quo.
	So the president's statement to Sondland that he didn't want a quid pro quo doesn't mean what we thought it meant.
	Because he said it after somebody had already complained about a quid pro quo.
	So of course you're going to say it then.
	So that's one of the things.
	And then there's some issue about when the hold was put on the funds, and apparently the hold was officially put on right after the phone call, making it look more like a quid pro quo, etc., So here are the ways that these important revelations have been described by CNN on their website.
	The President's claims of innocence looked even more incredulous.
	So there must be some good reasons coming, because his claims of innocence are looking more incredulous, so whatever follows that statement would be something about this new information.
	After the New York Times reported that Trump released the hold on Ukraine aid after he was briefed on the whistleblower report outlined in his dealings with Ukraine.
	What? So, he released the aid that literally everyone wanted him to release.
	Everyone. But because he did it after the whistleblower thing came up, that must be evidence of his guilt.
	But it would also be evidence that he was doing the right thing.
	Isn't it? Because can you ever go to jail for doing the right thing?
	If literally everybody in the world said, you should release this aid, and then he releases the aid, do you go to jail for that?
	Is that evidence of guilt?
	That you did what everybody thought was a good idea to do?
	Does it matter when you did it?
	It doesn't matter when you did it.
	If you did something that was a reasonable thing to do, it's hard to see that at putting you in jail.
	But wait, there's more.
	There's more from CNN's website.
	But the timeline revealed Tuesday in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandee.
	Listen to the lead-up.
	Now remember, complexity is a big part of the story.
	So if the public can't understand the story, it's like it didn't happen.
	So see how hard it is to understand the story.
	But the timeline revealed Tuesday in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandy.
	And that's just the beginning of the sentence.
	I have not even gotten to the content of the sentence yet.
	So after all of that, Outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.
	What? It outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.
	Is bizarre against the law?
	In whose opinion was it bizarre?
	What kind of accusation is bizarre?
	Can we go to jail for being bizarre now?
	Then they also say, new revelations put Trump on shakier ground.
	That's the headline.
	Okay, he's on shakier ground because, because, here's the because.
	The developments on Tuesday illuminated the fact that there's still much to learn about the president's actions regarding Ukraine.
	Wait, is it against the law that there's much to learn?
	Does that put you on shaky ground because there's much to learn about it?
	That's not much. How about the confusion that Sandy, the OMB guy, and other line-level OMB aides felt about why the Ukraine aide was being withheld, along with their inability to get answers, showed how the Trump administration's unusual enterprise was shrouded in secrecy, even from the very people who were handling the money.
	Shrouded in secrecy.
	Now, this is quite a shocking allegation.
	Because the allegation here is that a large bureaucracy was not communicating well.
	I've never heard of this before.
	Are you kidding me? CNN's breaking big news.
	The large bureaucratic government of the United States has people within it Who don't know what the others intend and they're not communicating well.
	First time I've ever heard of something like that.
	So they're turning, you know, a normal bureaucracy where people are complaining about the boss and they don't know why the boss is doing what the boss is doing.
	I literally got rich just writing about that.
	I mean, that's the Dilber office every single day.
	In Dilbert's office, the employees don't know why the boss is doing what the boss is doing, and they imagine it's for the wrong reasons.
	That's every employee with a boss.
	But it's got turned into news because it's bizarre, and it's putting them on shaky ground.
	So that's how CNN had to turn a lot of nothing into a something, by words.
	Through the power of words, they turned...
	Nothing, really, that's new evidence against the President.
	It is evidence against the exculpatory stuff.
	In other words, it's less exculpatory than it was, but it's not evidence of a crime, which is completely different.
	So I thought I made a note, but I didn't.
	So Byron York was tweeting around a lawyer's analysis of why President Trump is not necessarily in any trouble legally, sort of a clever legal argument about why the bribery charge won't be a good play.
	But I tweeted back, and I'm starting to give some good agreement with this, That everybody's thinking past the sale.
	In fact, this is one of the greatest persuasion plays I've seen in years.
	Better than, maybe better than anything Trump has done.
	But the Democrats have managed to make everybody think past the sale.
	So if we're arguing about whether there was bribery or quid pro quo or who said what or what was the timeline, all of those things we're talking about, 100% of them, Are past the sale that we haven't talked about?
	And the sale is whether the president was appropriately asking for an investigation.
	Was it the president's job to look into it?
	And the answer is yes.
	It was unambiguously, unambiguously, in the interest of many of the citizens in the United States, not all of them, not every single person cared, But there certainly were plenty of citizens in the United States who were aware of the Biden-Burisma thing who wanted some more information on that.
	And they would be happy to know that nothing happened because this is a potential next president of the United States.
	And they'd be happy if they found that something happened and we'd be glad we found out so we didn't get into any kind of blackmail situation or influence by Ukraine.
	So... Now, just the fact that many of the people in the United States were not following the story and therefore were not interested in calling for this investigation doesn't change the fact that if they did know about it, it would be a legitimate interest.
	There's much that our government does that we, the citizens, are not voting on or clamoring for.
	They're just ordinary, the business of the government, so the government knows what it needs to do to serve the public, so it doesn't.
	The president was asking the same question of Ukraine That many citizens that voted for him would also want to like to know.
	And also people who did not vote for him would also like to know the answer to that.
	They might not ask for it.
	They might prefer he didn't ask for it.
	But that's a political question.
	They still want to know the answer.
	The information is still important.
	Now, even if it comes out that there's nothing there, which I imagine would be the outcome, we'd like to know.
	We'd like to know if there's nothing there.
	So I'm waiting for the world to catch up to me and realize that the entire thing has been thinking past the sale.
	So you saw me tweet and talk about Michael Herriot's article in The Root in which he was talking about Pete Buttigieg and I said it was really good writing and you should read it.
	Ben Shapiro wrote an article that was rerun on Fox News and he was talking about the The Root article going viral on Twitter.
	And I thought, did I do that?
	Who else was talking about this obscure little article in The Root?
	Did I make that viral?
	Was I part of making that viral?
	I don't know the answer to that, actually.
	So Ben had some Some disagreements with the article which are worth reading.
	I will not repeat them because I know Ben will be called all kinds of bad names for having an opinion, as he often is.
	So, Ben, I hope you can survive the pushback on that article.
	All right. So, Steve Cortez has an article I just tweeted talking about how There seems to be a more coordinated strategy by the Democrats to slander Republicans and supporters of the President.
	So there's more and more we're seeing.
	It's not brand new, but it seems like it's picking up steam.
	The labeling of Trump supporters as being bad people.
	This is kind of new.
	This is kind of new.
	I don't know if...
	I can't think of any time in the past...
	When the supporters of a candidate were demonized for being the devil because they support the devil, I guess.
	So we went through the phases of being deplorables and racists, and now the latest is cultists.
	So Steve Cortez has a great article on that.
	Check it out. It's in my Twitter feed or his.
	You can see the link.
	And I started to wonder, is that something that Republicans should do back to In other words, is that something that should be returned?
	I suppose you could say it is.
	I'm already happening.
	Because Trump supporters like to call people on the left socialists and communists, except those are names they use for themselves.
	So it doesn't really hurt anybody to call them a socialist when they're labeling themselves socialists.
	Calling them communists goes another level, but that feels more like hyperbole.
	It doesn't really feel like an insult.
	Yeah, that's true.
	We do refer to them as zombies sometimes.
	But I don't think there's any equivalent kind of thing.
	I'm going to go back to a general, gross generalization.
	Here's a gross generalization.
	The thing that describes conservatives the best, and I think I'm the only person who's ever said this.
	I've never heard this anywhere else.
	Well, I'm sure somebody said it, but I'm not aware of anybody else saying it.
	The thing that defines conservatives is a collective agreement that everybody should be following the same set of rules, not the same outcomes.
	But that we should all have the same set of rules, and that those rules must be agreed upon in a credible way, such as the Constitution and such as the laws.
	Now, I'm always impressed by conservatives who think that, and I'm not going to argue abortion here, so my opinion will not be present in the next comments.
	I'm talking about other people.
	Conservatives believe that abortion is literally murder.
	It's murdering babies, and it's happening by the millions every year.
	Have you ever been amazed that conservatives who are armed to the teeth believe that murders are happening by the tens of millions babies?
	They believe that babies are being murdered by the tens of millions in this country.
	They're armed to the teeth, and they allow it.
	In other words, there's no revolution.
	Now, you get a crazy person now and then who shoots an abortion doctor, but I'm not talking about that.
	I'm talking about, in general, conservatives have not taken up arms against the thing that they would describe as tens of millions of babies being murdered every year by the state, in a sense, because they've made it legal.
	Now, how can we have a stable country with that going on?
	And the reason is that conservatives...
	I have a tremendous respect for the process.
	The process in this case is the Constitution, the Supreme Court, our laws.
	And as long as the process was followed, even though they didn't get the result they wanted, and even though they complained bitterly about the Supreme Court making up laws, it still went through the process.
	And look at the power of that.
	I mean, there's an incredible power To the fact that conservatives will, even under these extreme, extreme conditions, what they imagine to be tens of millions of murders of babies, they still stay within the system.
	They don't leave the system, because that's their most basic belief, is that the system is the only thing that can protect us all in the long run.
	Because if you violate the system, everything falls apart.
	It's chaos. Whereas the people who are not conservatives, the people on the left, are increasingly driven by hate and fear, it seems to be.
	Hate and fear.
	And that's not much of a system.
	So it's no surprise that they're not winning the presidency recently.
	Okay, that's all I got.
	Yeah, the conservatives are still fighting for pro-life positions, but they're doing it within the system.
	Scott, one of your best threads ever?
	Well, thank you.
	The fourth Holocaust is abortion.
	Well... You could say that in China even more than the U.S., right?
	I think there's massive abortion in China.
	So you can certainly make that case.
	Oh, anything on Omar and Qatar?
	Yeah, let's talk about that.
	I've been watching with interest, and I don't know if any of you have noticed this, that the imam...
	The Imam of Peace?
	Is that what he goes by on Twitter?
	So I think I've got that right.
	The Imam of Peace.
	That's how he labels himself on Twitter.
	He's saying that he has evidence that would tie Ilhan Omar, Representative Omar, to funding by Qatar.
	And that would be a Middle East connection That would be super, super bad were it exactly the way he's described it.
	Now, he has gone into great detail with his various sources, and I've been sort of following it casually because I don't want to get too excited about it until what he's saying crosses over into at least one of the major news organizations.
	And I don't think that's happened yet.
	So I keep watching for the Sultan, the Imam of Peace, his story about Omar to cross over into the more fact-checked mainstream or Fox News kind of world, and it hasn't. And I don't know why.
	So I would say I'm going to put a big question mark on that story.
	It could be that we need to learn a little bit more Could be that Cutter has too much control over, I don't know, over what?
	Over the media here or something?
	I don't know what the reason is.
	But for some reason, his story, which looks gigantic, if true, is not passing into the mainstream media.
	So just keep an eye on it.
	I'm not going to say...
	I would say...
	My understanding is that the source of this is credible.
	Is that your understanding as well?
	By the way, so those of you who are familiar with who I'm talking about, the Imam of Peace, would you agree that historically that he's credible?
	He's not a conspiracy theory guy at all.
	Somebody here says, do not trust the Imam of Peace.
	Well, so where I'm at is you should put a big question mark next to it.
	I'm not going to tell you to trust him or not trust him, but if it doesn't ever pass over into the professional news organizations, you're going to have to ask yourself why that didn't happen.
	And that's all I have for today.

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