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Dec. 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:09:53
Episode 754 Scott Adams: Colluding With Russia, Impeachment Theater, Greta, China
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Time Text
Oh, hey!
I didn't see you there. Good to see you all.
I was just doing a little colluding with Russia.
This... Is the Russian language version of Win Bigly.
I just got this in the mail.
Now, for those of you who don't speak the Russian language, let me translate.
What this says here, and I'm not really great with languages, so I think this is approximately right.
What this says is...
Now...
I'll say that again.
I think that's right.
Correct translation.
And this is how they spell my name.
That's Scott, I believe.
Now, it was not my idea to include a black fist on the cover.
That was apparently a Russian idea.
I did not collude on that.
I could have colluded, but I did not collude.
But speaking of collusion, that makes me think of the simultaneous SIP. How about we all do a little colluding right now?
Collude with me now on the simultaneous SIP. All you need.
You know, all you need.
Here's a cup or a mug or a glass, a snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grill, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that made everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go. Oh yeah.
Simultaneity. It's the best.
Well, I woke up this morning and there's news.
There's news all over the place.
So let's talk about that news.
So after watching Horowitz testify yesterday, I have the following revisions in my opinion.
Well, revisions and additions to number one.
If you didn't watch Horowitz's testimony and when he was answering questions, damn, that guy is a good communicator.
You will rarely see somebody as clear and as crisp as Horowitz.
He's got a good communication game.
So he gives me confidence Simply because he was so good at handling the testimonies and stuff, the questioning, he gives me confidence because he seemed like a real stray shooter, very capable guy.
So that part's good. I like to call out the good news when we see it.
But here's what I took away from it.
I had argued that you could not...
You could not eliminate the possibility that the so-called 17 errors that were made that coincidentally were all in the same direction.
I said, you can't eliminate the possibility that it's just normal errors.
Even the fact that they're all in the same direction would not be that unusual.
But... And I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute.
But... But, I say...
Horowitz was asked, essentially, his opinion of whether it could be a coincidence that there were so many opinions in the same direction.
He didn't directly answer the question, but he made it clear in the way he answered the question that he couldn't imagine any other explanation than intention.
In other words, it seems that there's no way you could get to all of those errors in the same direction.
Unless people intended to do it.
Now, when it's intended, what does that mean?
Does it mean that there was a conspiracy in which they all got together and they said, hey, we're going to get rid of this president?
It could. That possibility has not been eliminated from the option set.
Maybe Durham will say more about that, confirming or eliminating that possibility.
But I would suggest...
That there's a possibility that has not been stated.
So I'm going to state it for you.
So remember, the two possibilities are that nothing really happened and that everything that Horowitz found falls into the category of sloppy work, things you wish didn't happen, but no great conspiracy because there was a reason for the investigation.
And there were mistakes made, but the basic reason for the investigation was sound.
So the Democrats would say, well, there's not much there, and certainly there's nothing like a conspiracy that's been found.
I have to add the it's been found part.
Then the other theory, the opposite, is that there is a deep state conspiracy, the insurance policy, the text, the obvious bias against the president, the 17 mistakes all in the same direction.
There's no way that that can be anything but a conspiracy.
But is there anything in the middle?
Is there anything between normal mistakes, just people doing their job, And a conspiracy to overthrow the government.
And I would say that there is.
And let me explain the middle place.
The middle place looks like this.
You had your fake news media telling the world that the elected President Trump was the next Hiller.
And according to the news, and these were legitimate sources of news, at least the opinion people on those news shows, were literally telling the public that something as dangerous as Hitler, actually Hitler, and his name was used over and over again by his critics.
So the fake news convinced the entire country, including people at the FBI, That Hitler had just got elected or was about to get elected or could get elected.
Now, if you were in the FBI and you thought that was true, how would you act in each of the individual decisions that maybe could go either way?
Well, certainly if there's a gray area, and you think, well, there's certainly not much evidence of any Russia collusion, but how much would it take to convince you to look into it if you had been told by the fake news that Hitler had just come to office?
Well, what you would probably do is you would act on your legitimate belief that you were saving the country.
And so, when you say to yourself...
Were all these actions intentional?
I think the weight of odds and evidence is that at least most of it was intentional.
So if the acts were intentional, does that tell you enough?
Well, it depends why they did it.
So even if all the actions were intentional, all the breaking of the rules, all the falsifying of the FISA applications, if all of it was intentional, you still have to ask a second question.
Why? Now, if it was just about power and keeping their jobs, well, that's pretty bad.
That's as bad as it gets.
But what if...
The FBI was just as brainwashed as the rest of the country and thought that there was a genuine risk to the Republican civilization as a whole.
Does that look the same?
I would argue, no, a number of people challenged me on that and said, Scott, Scott, it's the FBI. The FBI doesn't act on rumors and news reports.
The FBI acts on evidence.
And if they needed to know if something was true or not true, they would go investigate it and they'd get evidence.
So the FBI, unique among people, would not be influenced by the fake news.
Scott, Scott, Scott, what are you thinking?
To which I say, the FBI are human beings.
If you want to know how susceptible the FBI is to being brainwashed or to simply being human, look at their 17 errors.
They're very human.
Look at their text messages.
Their text messages are very human, and the text messages clearly indicate Trump derangement syndrome.
So here's my filter on it.
I say the fake news created Trump derangement syndrome that affected everybody, including the FBI. The FBI did not personally investigate every claim from the fake news.
It wasn't their job to do so.
They absorbed it just like everybody else in the public.
They sort of believed the things they were primed to believe, and they sided with their team and thought that you've got some problem to the entire world.
So, Durham might still change my opinion and all of our opinions with more information, but I would say the most likely explanation is Is that it was people acting mostly independently.
In some cases, you know, they may have had conversations.
But mostly independently and all having the same thought.
We must stop Orange Hiller.
So the real villain here, in my opinion, is the fake news.
The fake news brainwashed people.
into thinking they had to stop Orange Hiller and the FBI, or at least some of them, probably thought it was their job to do it.
So that's my belief.
Now, I know before the dumb people pile in and say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you can't excuse the FBI for what they did.
Did you hear me excusing them?
Did you hear that? No.
In this world, if you commit a crime, it doesn't matter why you did it.
If you do something wrong, it kind of doesn't matter why.
It doesn't matter what your internal thoughts were.
You're still responsible.
If you have good thoughts, but you commit a crime, you still go to jail.
So I'm not defending anybody.
I'm not excusing anybody.
I'm telling you where the problem probably originated.
And the problem originated...
In my view of the world, my filter of the world, with the fake news.
And the fake news, I believe, brought people, including members of the FBI, including everybody else, to a place where they would do things they would not normally consider appropriate.
Look at the impeachment process.
Are all of the Democrats involved in the impeachment process, are they all crazy?
Probably not. Look at all the Democrats who want to impeach the President, no matter what he's done.
They're just going to keep throwing impeachment at him.
They wanted to do it on day one.
Do they seem like they have, that they're, that they're acting rationally?
No. So, if you could observe very clearly that the professionals in Congress are not acting in any way that they would normally act because they're just all about the impeachment no matter the evidence, that's not normal.
Why would the FBI be excluded from being just as brainwashed?
So, That's my current take, subject to being revised.
So the FBI certainly failed hard on this.
But let us talk about the 17 errors.
Somebody said to me...
On Twitter, he said, if you roll a die, so one part of a pair of dice, 17 times and it always comes up with an even number, wouldn't you be able to reasonably conclude that the die was biased or fixed?
Is that a good point?
Is it a good point that if you had dice and you rolled them 17 times and it came up even every time, wouldn't you conclude there was something wrong with the dice?
Yes, you would. Yeah, reasonably you would.
There's a 1 in 100,000 chance it was chance.
Now, is that a good point?
No, it's a terrible point.
It's a terrible point.
In fact, if you read my book, Loser Think, the new one, you will see that I have a whole section on that about why this sort of thing is a terrible point.
Here's why. It's not nice.
Whatever the FBI was doing is not dice.
You can't use a dice analogy that has one variable, basically, you know, what is the physics of the dice.
You can't compare that to human beings in this complicated system.
It's all different variables.
Here's what I would imagine would be true with the 17 mistakes.
And here are the questions you should at least ask.
If we know that 99.7% of all FISA applications are approved, what would that tell you about the likely accuracy of all of the FISA applications in general?
Doesn't that tell you that they're fake?
Or some large percentage of them are?
Doesn't that tell you that the whole process is broken Not just the time that the FBI was working on this one case.
I think you could generalize and say that the FISA process was completely broken.
And I would imagine, if you were to look at every application, you would find omissions.
At the very least, you would find that exculpatory stuff had been left out.
Of other applications.
So, how unusual is it that somebody exaggerates their case to make sure that their FISA application goes through on the first try?
I don't know. If I had to guess, fairly common.
How about the error?
There were other errors that go into the category of error.
But not double-checking.
So in other words, there was an internal process that should have been done.
Somebody should have double-checked something and it didn't happen multiple times.
If you were to look at all the things that the FBI does, all the other cases, how often would you find that they were skipping a normal procedure?
I'm guessing a lot.
I'm guessing it happens all the time.
Wouldn't you? I mean, do you really think that the FBI is doing bang-up perfect work on everything else?
And it just happened to be the one thing we looked at closely, had a bunch of mistakes?
I doubt it. So, here's my thing.
If Horowitz is convinced, because he's looked at the details of these 17 mistakes, he indicated fairly clearly that it's not his job to read their minds, so he can't tell you what anybody was thinking, and I agree with that.
It's not his job. Nobody has that ability.
And he said... That they didn't find any documents that indicate their state of mind in any clear way.
And nobody testified that it was anything but mistakes.
So Horowitz basically couldn't conclude more than the powers of his office.
He couldn't read minds and he couldn't say more than the evidence suggests.
But he also very clearly indicated that there's no way that this could be anything but intentional.
I would still say that of the 17 things that all went in the same direction, probably some of them could be explained by the fact that all the FISA applications are exaggerated.
You know, that processes are routinely skipped if somebody in charge thinks it's not that important this time.
So, I doubted 17.
But still, I'll go with Horowitz that you can't imagine that it was anything but intentional.
But intentional still leaves you lots of room for interpretation.
Because why did they do it intentionally is the other question.
Alright, so are you as sick as I am of the conversations on cable TV about whether the FBI was spying or using surveillance?
Are you just sick of that?
And I have another section in my book, Loser Think, in which I talk about something called word thinking.
Word thinking is when you try to win an argument by applying your definition to a word.
That's not thinking. That's nothing.
You should just leave me alone if you're arguing about the definition of a word.
Do you care if somebody uses the word spying or they use the word surveillance as long as we're all talking about exactly the same actions?
Shouldn't make any difference at all.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say somebody puts a bullet in the head of an innocent person and they do it intentionally.
But let's say that they don't call it murder.
It's not self-defense, but they just call it shooting the person in the head for no reason.
But you call it murder.
Does it matter?
Does it matter? The guy's still going to jail.
It's still bad. The person's still dead.
Does it matter what word you put on it?
Does it matter if we call it spying or surveillance?
Does it matter? It doesn't.
So, you know, the FBI would claim, as would Horowitz, that there was a predicate for the investigation.
But there was not a predicate for continuing the investigation, as we have learned.
In other words, once it was learned that the Steele dossier was BS, they should have stopped.
But they didn't.
So the original...
Let's say, original surveillance may have had a predicate, very thin, very questionable.
Durham will probably question it.
But it sort of existed, according to Horowitz.
Once they knew that they had nothing, they continued.
At that point, it's just spying, isn't it?
So, in my opinion, it started as surveillance and it turned into spying.
But does it matter?
Does it matter what word I put on it?
It was bad. How about you call it...
How about that's the word you use?
Let's not call it spying.
Let's not call it legal authorized surveillance.
Let's call it...
Put any word on it you want it.
It's still just as bad.
Once the reasons for doing it disappeared, which is what Horowitz reports happened, once they didn't have a reason to do it, it wasn't good.
So whatever you want to call it, it wasn't good, and it wasn't justified, apparently.
All right. And I've got people who are yelling at me on Twitter saying, so, actually using the word so.
I'm amazed that people still tweet the word so at me after I'm famous for mocking everything that comes after the word so is always just ridiculous.
So, the fact that all 17 errors were damaging isn't proof of bias.
It's just a coincidence, Scott?
It's just a coincidence? No.
No, it's not a coincidence.
I never said it was a coincidence.
That's never come out of my mouth.
I have said it could be possibly explained by lots of errors and that people wanted to get a job done so all of the errors were in the same direction because of bias.
But bias...
You'll never hear me say that human beings don't have bias.
You're never going to hear me say that the FBI has no bias.
I'll never say that.
I wrote books on people all having bias all the time.
I'm not going to say there's no bias.
That would be cray-cray.
All right. Mitch McConnell is indicating that they haven't decided how the Senate will handle The impeachment case, assuming it gets voted and handed over to the Senate, and he's considering not calling witnesses.
So apparently the Senate has wide flexibility in how they handle it, how they handle the witnesses, even if they have witnesses.
So who talks, who gets to do anything.
So it's all up in the air, and the majority of the Senate can just decide what an impeachment trial looks like.
And with no guardrails, they can do whatever they want.
Now, how much do you love the idea of having the vote in the Senate without any witnesses and without a trial?
I love it. Here's what I would do if I were McConnell.
I would dismiss the two counts with one sentence apiece, no witnesses, and go right to a vote.
And in the two sentences, I've said this before, but so the first count is obstruction of Congress.
So obstruction of Congress.
You could say something such as Alan Dershowitz says, there's nothing in the Constitution about obstruction of justice.
Well, actually, let me give you a cleaner way to say it.
Asking the courts to rule on something is not obstruction of justice.
That's it. One sentence.
Asking the court to rule on something where the Congress and the executive disagree is never obstruction of Congress because it's just using the process.
So one sentence. Asking the courts to rule is not obstruction of Congress.
And don't say anything else.
And then the next one, you can word it a little differently, but basically you'd say something like that.
Say something like this.
Everyone now agrees that Burisma was worth looking into.
So even the Democrats' lawyer witness, the person who was on the Democrat side, what was his name?
Goldman, I think, said when asked that, yeah, the Biden-Burisma connection was worth looking into.
So you could say that there's consensus that Burisma and Biden was worth looking into, and so therefore it was, you know, worth the president checking out.
And then secondly, you could say there's no evidence that Ukraine was aware of any quid pro quo requirements, because the evidence now is that there's literally no witness anywhere in the Ukraine government who's willing to say they were even aware of That the funding was being withheld.
So something like two sentences, or maybe two sentences apiece, and then just take it to a vote.
Now here's the power of that.
If you allow a big complicated trial, what will people conclude?
Well, the news will report that their side won, and then the other news will report that the other side won.
No matter how the vote goes, people are going to look into the complexity, cherry pick the things they want, and say, yes, look how our side looks great.
You can't do that.
You can't hide in the complexity if it's all removed.
So here's the tricky play.
If Mitch McConnell decides to remove all the complexity and say, we're not even going to have witnesses, I'm gonna have you vote based on just two sentences.
One sentence apiece debunking each of the claims.
If these sentences look true to you, let's vote.
And then just vote.
And here's the beauty of it.
What would the news have to cover?
If there's no trial, the only thing they have to cover is the two sentences.
And they would have to publish those two sentences endlessly.
And those two sentences completely destroy the impeachment case.
As soon as you allow any complexity into the conversation, both sides can claim victory and say, oh, can't you see it?
It's there in the complexity.
My case has been made.
You strip all that complexity out, put it into two sentences, and even the news that hates you They have to keep repeating those two sentences because there's nothing else.
It's the only news on the biggest topic in the country.
They would have to just continually repeat them and would be very persuasive.
All right. Now, I saw something in the news that I don't understand and I need a little help on it.
There's a question of whether the Senate will want to vote on acquittal In terms of the impeachment.
Versus dismissing the case.
And I guess that's different.
But I don't know what are the details of when it's different or how they would act differently or how things would be worded or what it all means.
It sounds like on the surface that an acquittal would say not just that we're not going to impeach but that he's innocent.
Or something like that?
Is that the difference? So, if there is that distinction, that might be important.
Alright. There's a video of Joe Biden on the campaign saying that he doesn't trust people who think with their brain first, but rather the way he does it is he starts with his gut And then it goes to his heart, and then it comes out of his mouth, bypassing the whole brain situation.
Now, if you're Joe Biden, I don't know that that's a bad idea, to just bypass his brain entirely and just let his intestines and his guts and, of course, his heart, your major organs and your torso.
If I'm Joe Biden, I'm going to let my torso do the thinking for me.
He apparently thinks that's a good idea, good enough to say it in public.
Andrew Yang might have a different opinion.
He might say, hey, why don't we start up here in the head area, the same place that we do the math and stuff.
Let's maybe get things going up in the brain section of the body.
And then, you know, once you've got something up there, it's okay to test it against the torso.
I think the torso needs to get involved.
You can't let the torso take the day off.
But maybe start up in the cranium, brain area, and then test it on your guts.
I'm just guessing that Andrew Yang might prefer it in that direction.
Just saying. President Trump has announced Just recently, just today.
He says, and I quote, getting very close to a big deal with China.
They want it, and so do we.
So do we.
Well, who's we?
I don't want it.
So I tweeted back, does that mean that the top fentanyl dealer in China is dead?
Because if he's not dead...
I do not favor any kind of a trade deal with China, now or ever.
As I mentioned, Jim Cramer, who is highly influential, certainly on CNBC and the financial world, Jim Cramer is now saying explicitly and clearly, and more than once, that this would be a good time to walk away from China and just decouple.
I, of course, say the same thing as does Gordon Chang and Kyle Bass and apparently Steve Bannon says that too.
So Steve Bannon obviously identified with the right and Jim Cramer who explains that he's more sympathetic to the left Both agree that this is the time to walk away from China.
Same day that Trump says we're very close to a deal.
I don't know that we're close to a deal.
I don't think that you could take that as being reliable, shall we say.
We might be close to some kind of a deal that addresses only tariffs.
But at the same time, it would be crazy for American companies to do new business in China.
So I think that we could have a trade deal and decouple at the same time.
Meaning that, you know, if there's some advantage to the United States to say, you know, we'll drop this tariff if you drop this tariff.
You know, if it's a tariff-to-tariff situation, I can see that maybe we can make that deal while working on the other stuff, but we certainly shouldn't be sending any new business to China, period.
So that's the decoupling part.
Maybe you can keep what's there and maybe buy and sell some stuff, but certainly decouple in terms of the long term.
So, and I've said this very clearly before, that if we do sign a trade deal with China, That is intended to be comprehensive, if it's intended to be the deal, and they have not already imprisoned or killed their top fentanyl dealer,
whose name we know, 60 minutes, tracked him down and talked to him, he's easy to find, you know, FBI has him on their list, China knows who it is, and he's just walking around, free, sending fentanyl to this country, killing tens of thousands of people.
As long as he's free...
I can't support any comprehensive trade deal.
Is it my imagination or is Mike Bloomberg trying to buy an election?
You know, he's putting money into Democratic candidates.
He's putting money into defeating the president.
How happy...
Our Democrats, that their billionaire is trying to buy the election for them, as is Tom Steyer.
Doesn't that seem a little bit off-brand?
Do you think AOC is looking at Bloomberg and saying, yeah, Mike, buy us some election there?
Yeah, so...
I don't know how Democrats are okay with Bloomberg...
Alright, I know you want me to talk about Greta.
So Greta Thunberg has been selected as Time's Person of the Year.
Now, a lot of you are saying, what?
What? It should have been somebody else.
How can they put her on there?
But let me explain something about how Time picks the Person of the Year.
What they say they do is they pick the person who has the most influence.
So it doesn't mean that they're good or bad.
It could be Hitler. But it has to be somebody who has the biggest influence on the world.
Now, is that really how they pick it?
No. No.
That's what Time Magazine tells you.
What they say publicly is we're picking the person who's just had the most impact.
That's not why they do it.
They do it to sell magazines.
Who is the best pick for selling Time magazine and making you talk about Time magazine?
Greta. Greta makes you argue.
Greta makes it a headline.
If it had been somebody boring that was not controversial in one way or another, You wouldn't care.
They would get no free publicity.
So when you see Greta on the cover of Time, the frame you should put on it is that Time Magazine is taking advantage of Greta's I say divisive ways, because that's what gets you the most impressed.
So do not think that time is complimenting Greta.
They are simply using her for their marketing purposes, which is what the time person of the year is.
So it's not like they chose this one case to use somebody for their marketing purposes.
That's just what they, that's the normal process.
You know, whoever they pick is for their internal marketing purposes.
So, President Trump tweeted about this.
I think the President always thinks he should be on the cover of Time Magazine, and I would argue that he probably should be.
You know, if you really were picking the most influential person, it would just be, you know, Trump every time.
But, of course, time needs to, you know, mix it up.
So, the President tweeted about Greta being on Time Magazine.
He said, quote, Greta must work on her anger management problem.
Then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend.
Chill, Greta, chill.
All right, I read that first thing in the morning when I first woke up, and I laughed and cried for about five minutes.
Now, the thing that's funny...
And all the trolls, of course, come out.
But the thing that's funny is not that he's making fun of Greta.
It's not that. It's the way he says it and the fact that he says it at all from the office of the president.
If any one of us said this same tweet, it wouldn't be that interesting, right?
It would just be somebody on the internet complaining about something.
It's the fact that it comes from the president of the United States that makes it hilarious.
And I can say with confidence that he knows that.
In other words, he knows what he's doing.
He knows exactly what reaction this is going to get.
So as tweeting goes, one of the best.
Now, not to be outdone, Greta's profile on Twitter was immediately updated.
Now, many of you are tweeting at me this morning saying, it's not Greta who updated that.
We don't know what she's thinking, but she has some adult working on her social media, so it was some adult who decided to change her profile to say the following.
A teenager working on her anger management problem, currently chilling, and watching a good old-fashioned movie with a friend.
Very well done, Greta or your handlers.
So I'm going to say A-plus troll tweet from President Trump about Greta.
And I will say an A-plus reaction by either Greta or her handlers, whoever does their social media.
But I imagine Greta approved it.
I can't imagine they would put that up there without Greta giving it the thumbs up.
So I'll give her the credit.
Tim Pool makes the following good observation.
Talking about Greta, he says that scowling, he tweeted this, scowling at people saying, how dare you, and talking down to them, results in people doubling down in their opposition to you.
That is scientifically correct, Tim Pool.
When you insult people, And try to change their minds.
Don't expect to change their minds, because the insult is really the end of the conversation.
As Tim goes on to point out, you have to develop a rapport first, then you can offer a solution.
I call it pacing and leading, but it's the same thing.
Then Tim says, Greta is divisive, angry, spoiled, mean, and condescending.
Well, I don't know if she's all that, but she comes across as all that.
So I can't see inside her heart Or her mind, or her gut, says Joe Biden.
But we can certainly conclude that people are receiving it that way.
Here's my take.
And of course, all the trolls are coming after me because I'm making fun of a minor.
How dare I? How dare I make fun of a minor?
How dare I? The dumbest comment I got, because analogies are stupid, somebody said, Scott, Scott, Scott, would you be mocking if Baron Trump, you know, would you mock Baron Trump?
You mock Greta.
So, Scott, if you would mock Greta, would you not mock Baron Trump?
What's the difference, Scott?
What's the difference? Well, there is a difference, Dale.
Barron Trump is not trying to influence a multi-trillion dollar world-altering budget.
If he does, if you ever see Barron Trump sail across the ocean and talk at the UN and try to influence a multi-trillion dollar budget, you can expect that I will come down pretty, pretty hard On Barron Trump.
But do we expect Barron Trump to do anything that stupid?
No, we don't. We expect Barron Trump to live a private life and, like Melania says, leave him alone.
He's just trying to live his life.
He's just a kid.
Leave Barron alone.
But, Any kid who's 16 and trying to change the world and involved in politics and in the biggest issue and playing on this level, I say she's playing in the big leagues.
And in my opinion, those who are saying, Scott, Scott, Scott, you have to go easy on her because she's a minor, I don't think you're showing her enough respect.
She made it to the big league by being able to play in the big league.
She made it to the big league because she can play in the big league.
Somebody says she's 16, but I'm seeing people in the comments saying she's 13.
I don't believe that's true.
And we'll need a fact check on that.
But I'd also like to add into the thinking a theory that I heard from someone who shall remain nameless, that there's a good possibility she's older than her published age.
There's a good possibility. I'm not going to say that's true, but you cannot rule out the possibility that she's a little bit older than her stated age, which wouldn't be surprising because she's operating at a higher level.
So I say give Greta some respect because I am.
She attempted to try to play in the big league at whatever age she is, 16-ish.
She tried to play in the big league and she made the big league.
So if she gets treated as though she's in the big league, let's show her some respect.
She got there fair and square.
You know, of course she had lots of help from adults and stuff, but it's not like anybody else got there.
I mean, she still had to be Greta to take advantage of the help from the adults.
It didn't happen by itself.
So let's show her some respect, and I think she can take a joke.
Her profile change suggests that she at least approved it, I'm sure.
So she can take a joke.
She's playing in the big league.
We can gently, gently...
I do think we should be gentle because, you know, age is not irrelevant.
She is at a tender age.
But we can have some fun.
We can disagree.
We can poke at her the way people poke on Twitter.
I wouldn't go... You know, super hard at it, but I think you can have some fun with it, the same way the President did, and apparently she can handle that.
Here's an idea that I'm seeing a little bit in social media.
Have you ever heard of a letter of mark and reprisal?
I hope I'm spelling it right.
Mark, in this case, is spelled M-A-R-Q-U-E, a letter of Mark.
Is there a different pronunciation for that, like Mark-A or something?
I don't know. It's one of those things I've seen written a bunch of times, but I've never seen anybody say it out loud.
But anyway, there's a provision in the Constitution that That addresses this option, a letter of mark and reprisal, in which the United States can pay somebody to basically fight a war for us,
or go kill somebody. So we can basically get revenge, or we can attack by hiring mercenaries, and the Constitution actually specifically allows it.
Did you know that the Constitution specifically allows us to hire mercenaries?
There's some process.
And I guess it was used in the closer to the revolutionary days.
It was used to essentially hire pirates to attack the ships of countries we wanted to attack.
So, here's my question.
Do you see a day when private drone operators will be authorized by the government of the United States to fly their drones into cartel territory and start killing cartel members?
With the drones. Now, when I say private drones, I'm talking about, you know, the hobby-sized drones that you can put a gun on.
It's not going to take very long before there are militarized, you know, bullet-shooting drones.
You've seen them already on the internet, right?
If you go to YouTube, you can Google somebody attached a gun to a drone.
But nobody, I don't think anybody has yet Build a drone that is built from scratch to fire a gun.
Maybe somebody's done that.
I haven't seen it yet. But can you imagine, just visualize this, some letters of mark and reprisal that would authorize a certain number, not everybody in the world, but a certain number of Drone operators in this country to send their drones into cartel territory, simply hover around for a little bit, find somebody who looks like they're up to no good, come down and just shoot them, and then disappear.
Now let me ask you this.
Suppose you were a cartel compound, you know, full of armed guards and whatnot, and a swarm of of privately operated mercenary drones appear above, and they're all armed.
How hard would it be for a squad of drones, each one operated by an operator, to, you know, look through the view screen, line up people on the ground, and shoot them?
Somebody says already exists, and I would imagine that's true.
So here's what is easy for me to imagine.
Remember, the big problem with going to war with the cartels is you can't get the government of Mexico to ever agree.
You also don't really want to send our military down there.
You don't want boots on the ground.
Oh, somebody's telling me it's pronounced Marquet, letter of Marquet.
All right, I guess we need to get a ruling on that so we have a different opinion on the pronunciation.
But I could easily imagine that the government of the United States, perhaps not making it public, perhaps it's not public.
Maybe they just quietly authorize some private drone people to put a little drone firepower above the cartels.
Seems to me that's coming.
Because the beauty is that even if the drone gets shot down, the cartel won't know who was operating it.
They will know that the US government perhaps was operating it, but they won't really know.
All right.
What else have we got today?
So I was fascinated to see what the Democrat supporters were saying about the Horowitz report.
Now, if you didn't actually watch Horowitz's testimony, I don't think you could know from the news coverage just how devastating that is to the FBI. I mean, it's really, really bad.
Apparently, what Horowitz found...
It's just massive bad behavior at the FBI, all in one direction.
So it's really bad.
So I wondered, so what do the Democrats say about this?
And so I looked at what Josh Campbell said in an editorial or article in the USA Today.
So here's a sentence that he says like it's true.
He says, the IG found the Russia case was properly opened And uncovered no, quote, evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decision to launch the investigation.
So therefore, everything that Trump has been saying for a few years is all bunk because of what Josh Campbell just said.
Does that feel like a complete and accurate statement of what happened?
I'll read it again. So this is a Democrat's view of what the IG found.
That it was, quote, properly opened.
Let's just do it one part at a time.
Is it true that the IG found that the case was properly opened?
Well, it depends what proper means, doesn't it?
I think what the IG actually found is that there's no standard For when you can open a case.
Because the written standard says that all you need is an articulable basis.
In other words, you can simply put it in a sentence that makes sense.
So, the IG did say we can't say it was improper, nor can we say it's proper.
We can only say that the standard is so low that it's like a moot question.
So, When Josh Campbell says that the IG found that the case was properly opened, is that exactly true?
Because I don't know that the IG ever used the word proper.
I think it would be more fair to say there's no real standard, so therefore we're not going to say that it was improper.
That's really different, saying there's no standard.
The IG did say...
That it wasn't illegal or anything to open it the way it was.
Here's what else Josh Campbell leaves out.
He leaves out that at some point fairly early on, when the Steele dossier was debunked, they should have stopped.
If you don't mention that part, and the fact that the known bogus Steele dossier was used to continue the investigation after it should have been stopped, according to Horowitz, if you leave that out, you're really just lying to the people reading your article, I think. If you leave out that there were 17 errors that all went in one direction, You're not really telling your readers what happened, are you?
Because that's kind of important.
And I think you would have to mention that Horowitz clearly indicates, without saying so, that it's hard to explain 17 errors unless it's intentional.
So, did Josh Campbell make his point?
No. That there's no evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decision to launch the investigation.
Well, that's actually true.
But it's also true that a lack of evidence is not proof that it didn't happen.
That's kind of important.
Because I think Durham's going to give us a little more visibility.
And here's the most interesting question.
And I don't...
I'm not sure I understand this yet.
But George Papadopoulos...
Tweeted yesterday, apparently he's learning recently, that the investigation against Papadopoulos actually started long before the events that everybody's talking about.
And he doesn't know how.
That's right.
There's still a mystery about how Papadopoulos originally came to be investigated.
So, maybe that's what Durham knows.
If we find out that, let's say, I'm just going to pick a name randomly, the CIA was behind the initiation of all this, it could be that the FBI was following the rules, but they were set up by some external force.
Democrats or the CIA or CIA Democrats or somebody.
I'm not saying it's the CIA. I'm just saying we haven't ruled out that option.
All right. So, that's what's going on today.
Has anybody seen Brennan lately?
Is it my imagination or are Clapper and Brennan a little bit underexposed lately?
Like they, maybe they're staying off the air?
Maybe. Okay, I'm just reading here.
Oh yeah, Papadopoulos was with Ben Carson's campaign before he was with Trump.
Look at John Brennan's face.
Well, let me say this.
When I listen to all of the people in the FBI, I would say it's obvious that they have bias because they're human beings and it's obvious which direction their bias was because their actions and their text messages clearly show that.
So the FBI people were clearly operating with bias and You know, a reasonable person would say that's why they made the mistakes that they made.
They weren't really mistakes. They were operating on bias.
Now, here's the question.
If somebody is brainwashed by the fake news to think that cheating on their own internal procedures is actually worth it to stop Orange Hitler from taking over the country, would you call that a conspiracy?
Or would you call it incompetence?
I'm going to say that again because it's an interesting question.
If my theory is true, that there wasn't such an organized conspiracy theory so much as people on the same page doing independently things that they thought would be good for their team, after being brainwashed by the media to think that they were saving the country from Orange Hiller,
If you thought you were saving the country from Orange Hiller and you were just completely wrong, would that be a case of a conspiracy or a case of incompetence?
Right? So what does it mean to be fooled?
Well, when you saw the language and the text messages with Strzok and Page, isn't it obvious that they had Trump derangement syndrome?
It looked exactly like it.
It looked exactly like the people who have Trump derangement syndrome on Twitter.
They looked like they thought that this president wouldn't just be somebody with a different view of policy, that they thought it was like the end of the world or something.
So I think you could call it incompetence.
Conspiracy is a little harder to get to with the evidence we have, but perhaps Durham will...
We'll clear that up. Somebody says, give us a total break.
They were not fooled.
So those who say that the FBI employees were not fooled by the fake news have to imagine that the FBI employees have a special capability that makes them immune from the TDS that infected basically 100% of the people on their side.
That's a big stretch.
If you think that the FBI were immune...
To TDS, there is no basis for that belief.
All evidence suggests it would affect people equally no matter their training.
You can be fooled into participating in a conspiracy.
Yeah, and then I guess we'll, of course, have fascinating word-thinking discussions about the word conspiracy.
Imagine, if you will, That the employees all had talked about their mutual dislike for the president, let's say the employees of the FBI, let's say that they had talked with each other on a number of occasions about how much they didn't want Trump to get elected.
Is that a conspiracy?
Well, not by itself.
Suppose that they all talked about it in various casual and meeting settings, but they had also agreed that they're still trying to do the work of the public.
Is that a conspiracy?
No. Suppose...
They believed that Orange Hitler was coming to power, and they weren't operating in some kind of strict, organized way with the other people who had the same opinion.
It's just that when each of them were faced with a decision that could have gone one way or the other, They said, well, if Orange Hitler's going to kill us all, I'm going to err on the side of bending a rule.
I'm going to err on the side of saying, well, we have very slim predication, but it's something.
So the line between incompetence fueled by Trump derangement syndrome and actual conspiracy is kind of gray.
And I think you'll find people who can look at the same knowledge and still say, you know, have two different opinions.
All right. Was Scott fooled by fake news?
Depends which fake news you're talking about.
There's none of us who haven't been fooled by fake news.
That's not a thing. But we're fooled by different fake newses.
Yes, so one of the statements in, I think it was an email, is, quote, we'll stop him.
One of them asked, could Trump actually get elected?
And somebody said, we'll stop him.
What does that mean?
What does it mean, we'll stop him?
Who's we? Is we, Democrats in general?
Is we, the FBI, doing their job?
Legitimately. Because they thought there was actually something to be found there.
And so they thought, yeah, we'll stop him.
Because we'll do our legal investigation.
And we're going to find something wrong and that'll stop him.
So we don't know what we'll stop him means.
It could have been bluster. It could have been BS. It could have been just something you say in a tweet.
It could have been just acting confident.
It could have been just making somebody else feel better.
It could have been five different things.
We pay the FBI director to not be fooled.
Yes, but we don't expect it, because everybody gets fooled.
Your argument is not compelling.
Which part of it?
Was to help the globalists.
So one theory is that, well, there's two different theories.
One theory is that the FBI employees were trying to keep their jobs because they feared that if Trump took office that they wouldn't all get the promotions that they thought they would get under Clinton.
Maybe. You know, one has to assume that that's at least part of the bias.
That's certainly in the mix there.
Then somebody said in the comments that the FBI is really trying to work for the globalists.
I think that's the worst take.
I think the FBI, each individual was doing whatever they thought was good for that individual and maybe for the world.
But I don't think anybody was thinking globalist or non-globalist.
That's a stretch. FBI lawyer Clinesmith facing felony obstruction for doctoring the FISA evidence.
Yeah. Now, let me give you the non-conspiracy version of how Clinesmith could have removed the statement that Carter Page had been a source, and he changed it to the opposite, not a source. Could you imagine any innocent reason for doing that?
Well, I can.
Now, I'm not going to say that the reason Clyde Smith did that was honorable or good or that he had good intentions.
I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying that if you can't imagine the other possibility, you're suffering from a lack of imagination.
As I talk about in my book, Loser Think.
The lack of imagination in this case is that if you're locked into the theory that the only reason he would have done that is that he's just trying to get the president, you're ignoring the other reason that people do something like that.
Here's the reason. Suppose he thought the Carter Page thing was necessary.
And important. Let's say he actually believed it was important, but he knew that if he put in that little clause, it could raise questions that are hard to answer, but maybe it could be answered, they're just hard to answer, and it might have weakened the application.
If he thought the application was sufficient with or without that information, but he thought, you know, it's good for the world, it's good that we have this investigation, If I put this exculpatory thing in there, it probably wouldn't change the final result because whether or not Carter Page had been a source might not be everything you need to know.
Right? So he might have just said, you know, I'm going to weasel word this and I'm going to say, well, you know, by definition of what a source is, it wasn't exactly a source.
I'm going to say, if anybody catches me on this, I'm going to say we use different words for it.
So he's not a source. He's just somebody we talk to.
I'm just making this up now.
But the point is, the lawyer probably is going to have a defense that looks something like I wasn't really lying, because technically, I was right.
In a very technical sense, I'm going to argue that I was correct, even though it seems to have reversed the meaning of it.
So I think it's going to look more gray than you think it is when the details are looked into.
So here's the thing.
I'm not going to tell you that I disagree with Horowitz, who said all these errors going in the same direction have to be intentioned.
In this case, I'm giving you two possibilities of how it happened, and both of them are intentional.
In one case, it's intentional to get the president, because it's part of a conspiracy to take down the president.
In the other possibility, it's also intentional, but it's just to make things easier for the person who filled out the paperwork, because he doesn't want to do another round of answering questions, doesn't want to have to defend why Carter is still worth looking into, even with that fact.
Might have just been convenience.
And he might have just said, I think I could weasel this through because if anybody asks, I'll just say, well, it's technically true.
He's not working with us or not in any real way or it wasn't important or something like that.
That's what I'm thinking. He changed it to a lie that might be technically accurate when he gets a chance to defend himself.
Remember, when you're talking with lawyers, And you hear one lawyer give a case, how much should you rely on one lawyer's opinion who's on one side?
It's always going to look...
One lawyer talking without the counterpoint from the other lawyer is always going to be convincing because they're lawyers.
So you've heard one side.
You've heard the side that says, Clinesmith did something bad.
And that appears to be absolutely true.
But what you haven't heard is Clay Smith, who is a lawyer, give you his version of why he did it.
And when you get that version, there's a pretty good chance it's not going to be as clean as you thought.
I'll bet it will be something like, well, technically I was true.
I can see why you think this is misleading, but it was technically true.
I think it'll be something like that.
Open your mind.
Alright, I'm going to stop.
So to the person who said open your mind, I'm going to start blocking people who seem to be intentionally not understanding my point.
I'm telling you that 17 errors in the same direction and everything that Horowitz said clearly indicates intention.
But that we don't have confirmation that it was specifically a conspiracy.
I'm certainly open-minded to it being a conspiracy.
What am I saying that would suggest I'm not open-minded?
I'm literally accepting all of the explanations, talking about them all, and adding extra explanations.
If that's not open-minded, what does open-minded look like?
Those of you who made your decision a year ago and are saying, well, there it is.
It's in the FISA report, just like I thought.
I think you have to ask yourself if you've got confidence in your opinion a little too early.
Somebody's saying Page was a source for the CIA about 20 years ago.
yeah it would be easy to imagine that Clyde Smith is not going to be prosecuted for this because there's something in his answer that makes it close enough to being technically correct that he won't go to jail for it it may have been a conspiracy that came from the fake news as opposed to originating in the FBI that's correct
So it would still be a conspiracy, but it would be a conspiracy of the mainstream news to paint Trump as Hitler, which would have the effect of essentially activating everybody in the public to do everything they could every time they could to fix it.
All right. Give it time.
I'm just looking at your comments right now.
Alright, I think I've said everything I'm going to say and I'm going to talk to you all later.
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