Episode 805 Scott Adams: The #Unpeachment, Coronavirus, Bernie Surging, Our New Dictator
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
WHY are we waiting till Wednesday to vote on acquittal?
Olivia Nuzzi notes the happy, dancing Trump supporters at rallies
Bernie Bernie Bernie, his supporters, his policies and the deficit
DNC rule change qualifies Mike Bloomberg for next debate
Closing air traffic from China and the Muslim country ban
President Trump's huge persuasion error requires an explanation
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
It's good to see you. I'm so glad you could make it this morning.
Today is going to be one of the best coffees with Scott Adams since, I don't know, since yesterday?
It's been a long time, but this one will be off the hook, coming in hot.
We're going to have some fun today.
Now, for those of you who are new to this, let me give you a little preview.
We're going to talk about fun stuff first, and then toward the end, I'm going to give you one of the deepest criticisms of this president's persuasion skills you've ever seen from me.
So you're going to see the The biggest criticism, I think, probably the biggest criticism I've ever made of President Trump's persuasion skills, specifically.
All right, but before we get to that, and before we get to all the fun stuff first, I know why you're here, and it's probably for the simultaneous sip, and you don't need much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stye, and a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like my coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go. Mmm.
Woo-wee. Yeah.
You know, in all this talk about impeachment, I think we tend to look at the negative too much.
Let us just take a moment...
to look at the positive side of the impeachment process that we've just been watching and continue to watch.
Here's the positive side.
If you didn't have this impeachment, the only time you could enjoy Trump winning is on election days.
So Trump actually found a way to win in between elections.
Not bad.
After he wins his next election, and maybe even before that, I think you'll have a few more opportunities to win impeachments.
All the smart people are saying that they're just going to keep on going because they don't know what else to do.
They're sort of running out of attacks, wouldn't you say?
Here's an update on one of the prediction filters I often talk about.
I told you to watch the impeachment process play out.
And one of the filters for prediction is that politics will go in the direction that would make the best movie script.
In other words, the thing that has the most mystery and twists and turns and intrigue and interest.
Now, that would have been probably calling witnesses.
But it's also entirely possible that the witnesses would have had absolutely nothing to add to the process, which would have been a boring movie.
But still...
I thought that the movie filter predicted that we would get witnesses, and we did not.
So if you're keeping score, and this is a good thing to do, if you have a filter or predicting method, it's kind of useless.
Now, I'll go further.
It is useless unless you also track how well it does historically.
Because if you don't track it, you're going to forget when it doesn't work, and you're going to think it works more than it does.
So the movie filter did not predict The next step in the impeachment.
So just keep that in mind when you're keeping score.
Now remember I told you that there was going to be this weird thing happening where the Democrats would simply misinterpret what's happening and then complain about the misinterpretation.
And that would be all we'd be watching.
It's them misreading what somebody said, misquoting somebody, putting words in somebody else's mouth, and then criticizing the thing that they just literally hallucinated.
Here's one of the best examples you're ever going to see.
Now, sometimes you think to yourself, well, that's sort of a subjective thing, Scott, isn't it?
No. No.
It's not a subjective thing.
I'm going to give you an example from today.
It's fresh off the press.
You tell me if I'm being subjective, okay?
You're never going to see a better example of this.
So this is Chris Silliza, who writes for and appears on CNN. And he wrote in an opinion piece today, and it was about Marco Rubio.
And he was talking about Marco Rubio's, what he would call, what Chris Silliza would call, sort of a twisted and knots explanation of why he voted the way he did to not have witnesses.
And so this is what Chris Lizza says, just picking up the part where he's mocking Rubio.
And so Lizza says, and more broadly, how can anyone read, much less write?
All right, so Chris Lizza is saying, how can anybody else read this differently than I'm going to explain it?
I think you might.
But he's saying, how could you?
How could anybody...
So Rubio said, and I quote, So Rubio saying that there could be a situation where something technically meets the standard of impeachment, But it's just not really good for the country.
That's a pretty simple concept, right?
Now you can certainly say you should never do that.
That would be a reasonable thing to say.
You should say, I can't think of any examples where that would be true.
That would be a reasonable thing to say.
You could say, maybe we should rethink that.
There are a lot of things you could say about that.
But here's what Chris Silliza says about it.
And you have to see Silliza's misstatement of it really close to the original to see what he's doing.
So I have to read the original again just so you see it in close proximity.
So what Marco Rubio did say was this.
Just because the actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president from office.
Silliza's comment to this is, huh?
Huh? So, remember what I told you about the word so?
The word so in this context almost always, very close to 100% of the time, signals that what follows the word so is a complete misstatement of what somebody else said.
So let's see if this is a complete misstatement following the word so.
So, Trump has done things that meet the standard of impeachment.
No.
No, that wasn't in Rubio's statement.
Rubio said that...
It was a hypothetical. Just because this happens doesn't mean you have to do this.
But I do think that was a reasonable inference.
So, so far, I would say Silliza is making an inference that isn't in the sentence, but it's not unreasonable.
It's pretty reasonable. So, so far, okay.
All right? Good inference.
But, and this is what Silliza is putting into Rubio's mouth, But impeaching him for committing impeachable acts would be bad for our partisan divide?
Am I reading that right?
No, Chris, you're not reading that right.
There's nothing in Rubio's statement that said anything about healing our partisan divide.
It's not there.
It's absolutely hallucinated.
Let me read Rubio's sentence again.
This is amazing that anybody could do this in public and not be aware of what they're doing.
So Rubio did say, just because actions meet a standard for impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president.
So Lysa interprets that as, uh, you're saying, uh, removing him for impeachable acts, uh, would, would, uh, Would be bad for our partisan divide?
Where is partisan divide in that sentence?
This is crazy stuff.
Anyway, so look for how often you see a misstatement after the word so.
You'll be amazed. I wrote about that in my book, Behind Me, The So Tell.
Where is it? This one. Win Bigly.
All right. Now, of course, we're waiting until Wednesday.
For the actual vote that everybody knows what the vote is going to be.
So you say to yourself, why are we waiting till Wednesday?
Now the explanation given is that it gives time for all the senators to make a statement.
Is that why? Can senators not make statements after votes?
What's the reasoning that says the senators have to make the statement before the vote?
They can't make a statement after a vote because nobody would pay attention?
It's sort of sketchy, isn't it?
Who exactly is explaining to the public why we're waiting for something when we know what's going to happen, there's no mystery, everybody was already there, why don't you just get it done?
Here's a rule that I'm going to reinforce as often as I need to.
When your government does something that you don't understand on its surface, And they know you don't understand it on its surface because it's something you can't really understand.
And they don't explain it to you in a way that makes any sense at all, or at least is good for the country.
Something corrupt is happening.
So something corrupt is happening.
So I've seen in the comments that somebody's saying it's to get it on the record.
Yeah, I suppose that would get the speeches on the record.
That's pretty useful, right?
Because when I go back and read the record, oh, that's right, I'm never going to read the record.
Who reads the record?
Why does it matter if a senator said something on the record or if they tweeted about it, which is sort of on the record, right?
No, you can make an argument for why they have to wait until Wednesday or why they should or could or want to, but it doesn't pass the sniff test, does it?
Let me ask you this.
What's the argument that it's good for you?
If your argument is, well, it's good for the senators, because then the senators get to go on the record and they'll get more attention if they do it before the vote, okay, I get that.
But how's that good for you?
In this case, I'm saying you, a citizen of the United States.
I know many of you are coming in from other countries.
But If your government right in front of you is doing something that can only be good for them, wait a minute.
Wait a minute. Are the Democrats delaying this vote because it's only good for them politically?
And it's not good for the interest of the country?
What is it that we do in those cases when it's obvious that something is done for political reasons That is bad for the country because it's delaying our ability to get something done.
Good for the politician's re-election, but it's bad for the country.
What do we call that? Is there a name for that?
Oh yeah, that's right, right.
Impeachable offense. That's right.
It's an impeachable offense.
I'd like to see witnesses.
I think we should call some witnesses to find out why the Democrats are insisting to delay this vote and damage the country by being more inefficient and diverting us from real, real important stuff.
Feels impeachable to me.
Unless I miss the entire point of the Xi impeachment.
That's how it works, right?
When you do something that's only good for politics, and it's bad for the country, And it's obvious.
I mean, it's obvious, right?
Give me one argument why waiting till Wednesday is good for the country.
Go. None.
There are only arguments why it's good for the politicians.
That is impeachable, according to what we've learned.
All right, I don't mean that literally, but you know what I mean.
So, remember, if abuse of power is a standard for impeachment, What in the world did we just watch?
Did we not watch a massive exercise of the house totally abusing its power?
I mean this is what we just watched.
Let me see if anything I say about this strikes you as not true.
There was a sham impeachment for purely political reasons.
We know that because they explicitly started planning as soon as the president was elected or sworn in, I guess.
And they didn't care what the reason was.
And I think that's, you know, Molly Hemingway reported that she actually overheard Nadler talking about impeachment before they had even considered reasons.
So I think it's fair to say, since those facts are not in dispute, I think it's fair to say it was a sham impeachment.
So they do a sham impeachment, but beyond that, they do it incompetently according to their own standards.
So the House wanted witnesses, but did not go through the proper process to get them.
By their own description, I don't know how you could call that anything but incompetent.
So it was a sham impeachment.
Which they managed incompetently.
And then in order to fix their own incompetence of their sham, they decided that the best way to approach that would be to ask the wrong part of the government to fix their sham hoax incompetence.
That actually happened right in front of us.
It's funnier when you say it all together.
They incompetently managed a sham impeachment, but they thought they could fix it by asking the wrong part of the government to fix it.
And surprise, surprise, it didn't work out for them.
So if that's not abuse of power, I don't know what is.
So it looks like the bullshit of the day, because every day the media and the Democrats collude, they collude, I say, on messaging.
And the messaging that they're colluding on seems pretty, pretty obvious today.
They're going to be saying that because impeachment did not succeed or is about to fail on Wednesday, they're about to say that Trump has expanded the power of the executive branch, getting closer and closer to being a dictator.
He is becoming a dictator.
Why is Trump becoming a dictator?
Let me explain it again. Because there was a sham impeachment It was done incompetently, and then they asked the wrong part of the government to fix it.
Therefore, logically, President Trump is a dictator.
You followed the logic, right?
That all make sense to you?
Connect the dots?
If that didn't make sense to you, talk to a Democrat, because apparently that makes sense to them.
So... Here's what I say about that.
Can you imagine that if the media, the messengers in the media, if they had not packaged this idea that the outcome of this failed, sham, incompetent impeachment was that the president would become more like a dictator?
Would anyone have thought of that on their own?
In other words, is there anybody sitting down in America, watching this on TV, and before the pundits tell them that the natural outcome of all this is that Trump becomes more like a dictator, can you imagine a guy who's in the middle of the country,
sipping a beer, watching the news, and he's thinking to himself, hey, I think the incompetent failed GM impeachment that they tried to fix by asking the wrong part of the government I think it's going to make Trump more of a dictator.
There are how many hundreds of millions of people in the United States?
The number of them who would have come up with that interpretation on their own, without being prompted by the media messengers and brainwashers, I think is zero.
Zero? Do you think even one person would have thought of that on their own?
I mean, it's batshit crazy.
Yeah, so the 360 or 80 million or whatever, how many people there are in the United States, you know, men, women, children, old people.
Do you think there was even one person in the whole country who would have come up with that on their own?
And yet, that is the primary message of the day.
They've all decided that the message is Trump, he's taking it to a new level of dictatorship.
Alright, so pretty funny.
So Trump tweeted an article by Olivia Nuzzi.
Nuzzi? So she's sort of an anti-Trumper, but she wrote this article that I thought was weirdly balanced until it wasn't.
And she talked about how the Trump rallies...
At least in her subjective opinion.
I haven't been to a rally, so I can't verify that this is true or false.
But it was interesting that an anti-Trumper would say that the Trump rallies are like a celebration.
Everybody's happy and dancing.
And her interpretation was that in the beginning, when Trump was running for president, it seemed that they were angry.
So Trump supporters, according to her, have changed from this angry mob who wanted to, I don't know, get revenge, change the country, break the government, whatever it is they wanted.
Now they're getting what they want.
They have a President Trump, the country is running well in their opinion, and so they're celebrating.
This is a pretty big deal because I was talking to somebody smart the other day who was saying that there could be a problem with motivation.
That Trump voters might not be motivated because they sort of got what they wanted.
So it doesn't make you get off the couch unless you want to change something.
You know, it's easier to get up and go to the polls and get excited and everything if something is intolerable and you just got to go change it.
Now, I hear that argument.
That's not historically that I would say that has some validity.
But here's what's different. Everything about Trump.
Let me just summarize.
Here's what's different about Trump.
Everything. Everything.
Just everything. So every rule that used to work doesn't exactly automatically work with Trump.
Here's what's different.
Trump supporters have turned the whole Trump phenomenon into a walking party.
They enjoy it for literally the entertainment of it.
And I don't know if we can quite yet measure what impact being entertained has on people's motivation to actually get off the couch and go vote.
I think, especially since the experience of 2016, where the people who voted for Trump had this amazing endorphin, dopamine hit when he won the election.
So imagine this feeling.
You were a Trump supporter in early 2016 and before, maybe.
You'd been beat up.
You'd been called a racist.
You'd been told you're not going to win.
You're supporting a crazy man, a dictator.
There's no way it's going to be Hillary.
You're all going to pay. I mean, really some dark, literally, dark thoughts about you and your candidate.
And then, against all odds, on election night, you turn on the TV and the unbelievable happens.
The thing that you wanted to happen, some of you expected it, a lot of you didn't.
And suddenly, bam!
Something happened. President Trump won Florida.
He won the election. Bam!
How did that feel?
Think about it. That felt so good for the people who wanted him to win, the people who voted for him.
That felt so good that I can say that in my lifetime, If you don't count intimate physical relationships and maybe falling in love or something.
But outside of those things, I don't know if I've ever felt a better feeling, really.
Now, I was pretty deeply invested, so I had more to win, more to lose.
I was definitely out there because I was so public about my prediction that he would win.
But I've never felt anything that good outside of close personal relationships.
And I'd like to feel it again.
I have to think that the people who voted for him and got that, you know, the dopamine hit, want that again.
I don't know that regular voters who vote for regular candidates and win, they feel happy.
I mean, I think people who voted for Obama were happy.
Don't you think? But I think the Trump voters got a dopamine hit that was probably unprecedented because it was more unexpected.
And I think that that's going to drive a lot of people to the polls.
They'll want to feel how good it feels again.
And some people didn't feel it the first time and want to feel it.
So I think they're going to want to go feel that feeling.
So I'm not worried about enthusiasm from Republicans.
And by the way, if we're going to make some gross generalizations, let me make a gross generalization, all right?
And this doesn't apply to every person.
There are no gross generalizations that apply to each individual.
But as a gross generalization, I think it's true that what you could say about a conservative voter versus a liberal voter is that the conservative will do what feels right, even if it's hard.
See where I'm going with this?
The conservative voter is still going to vote even if it's hard.
If their schedule doesn't work, their car broke down, because voting is important.
So I'm not sure that motivation means exactly the same thing to a conservative voter versus liberal voter.
I think a liberal voter needs more of maybe an emotional reason.
I think a conservative voter It's just gonna vote anyway.
Because why? It's who they are.
It's part of their identity.
They're people who support the Constitution.
They vote. So I don't think anybody's gonna stay home who's a conservative.
I don't see that happening. Let's talk about Bernie.
So all the chatter by the political talking heads, they're saying that Bernie is surging in the polls.
He's, I don't know, depending on what poll you look at, he's winning everywhere, or he's at least tied with Biden.
But all the talk is about Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.
And so I thought I would run you through a little bit of Bernie strategy.
In other words, how to beat Bernie if you're President Trump.
The first thing I would note is that it seems to me And this could be just a biased interpretation, but it seems to me that Bernie supporters are disconnected from policy.
Now, certainly there are plenty of Bernie supporters who want his policies.
And they're not disconnected.
They want exactly what he's offering.
But when I look at the...
And I'm going to use some names without...
Let me admit I can't read minds.
But when I see people like Bill Maher jump in, I see Joe Rogan supporting Sanders, when I see people like that supporting him, I say to myself, is it because of the policies?
Do you think Bill Maher, I'm just asking, because I don't know, can't read their minds and I won't make an assumption, but do you think that they support him for his policies?
Because that's certainly not what Joe Rogan said.
When he mentioned that he might vote for him, what he mentioned was his consistency and authenticity, something like that.
And those are much to be admired.
I have the same feeling about Bernie.
There's a whole bunch about Bernie that's pretty good stuff.
But not his policies.
His policies are not good stuff.
So that's the first observation.
Some people want to beat Trump or just be on the winning side or Or signal that they're part of good people, not bad people.
Whatever it is they're thinking, it does seem disconnected from policy.
So that's the first point.
Then let's look at the matchup.
You've got a President Trump who, at least his supporters, you'd have to peel away some of his supporters to Bernie in order for Bernie to win.
And So you want a good match-up.
What would Republicans, the ones that Bernie needs to, you know, even independents, I guess, the ones he wants to wean away from Trump, what would those people think is Trump's biggest error, mistake, or flaw?
The people that Bernie wants to convert.
I would say they would say the deficit.
Deficit spending, wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you say if you were talking to a conservative and you said, okay, I know you like Trump, But tell me what you don't like about him.
Nine out of ten are going to list the deficit in the top one or two reasons.
Right? So how does Bernie line up on the most important point?
He's the only candidate you could imagine running against Trump who would make the deficit worse.
He's the only one who would make it worse.
Forget about the fact he would probably crash the economy and make us weaker internationally and whatever else you think about him.
On a match-up, he's the worst person you could run against somebody who only has one measurable flaw.
President Trump has a lot of subjective Things you can't measure.
Hey, his personality.
I think he's dangerous.
He might be impulsive. So he's got lots of that stuff that you can't measure.
But the one thing you can measure that he's unambiguously bad at is the deficit.
And they're going to run the only guy who makes that worse against that?
How does that make sense?
That's the worst matchup ever.
You know, plus you've got somebody with a booming economy running against somebody who wants to completely transition it.
What? Now, what is the other thing that Trump has as sort of a political weakness?
And I wouldn't say this is what Republicans say about him, but it's more about what Democrats say about him.
Because Bernie also has to get Democrats to be unified against Trump.
And one of the biggest complaints from prior years about Trump is that he's a misogynist.
He's not good for women.
Who is the only candidate who also has We're good to go.
I think Bernie has a 100% solid record of being supportive of women, being supportive of blacks, being supportive of everybody.
But the trouble is that through the election campaign, his supporters are being painted as misogynist.
And boy... And boy, do they act that way, at least online.
Now, I don't know what percentage act that way.
It's probably a low percentage.
But the active ones that you see a lot on social media, they tend to be kind of anti-woman-ish in their approach.
I don't know how many there are. So just in terms of impressions, well, none of this is real, at least in terms of Bernie's own views.
He looks like he's not that strong with women.
And I think What is his breakdown of men versus women who support him?
Bernie appeals more to men, doesn't he?
Somebody has to fact check me on that.
So if you've got somebody who appeals more to men running against Trump, I don't know if that's the way you get the woman vote.
Let me put this in other terms.
Trump could say, and I'll just give you some messaging that he could use to run against Bernie.
Trump could say that Bernie won't protect you But Trump already is.
Suppose you're trying to get the female vote.
Protection is a really strong word.
Because I think there is a male-female difference in terms of how frightened you would be about certain risks.
Men tend to be less frightened about physical risks because we don't have as many.
If I go out in public, the odds of me being assaulted by anybody in public are pretty close to zero.
For a woman, it's continuous.
Every time you go outside, you've got a risk.
So protection is one of those words that I think just has More deep meaning to women because they live in a more dangerous world than men do, subjectively speaking.
And statistically speaking as well.
So I think Trump could say he's already protecting us in all these ways.
He's good on law enforcement.
He's tough on terrorists and all that.
So that's a Trump advantage.
But And then there's a practical question.
How would Bernie get any of his policies passed?
I don't think Bernie is popular enough, even with Democrats, because there are enough Democrats who know his math doesn't work.
They're not going to sign up for his things.
What would be the point of electing Bernie?
Because you know his policies wouldn't pass, right?
The big stuff doesn't really have a chance, does it?
I don't think so. I suppose they could, you know, hope that they get the entire Congress, but I doubt it.
All right, so here are a few things.
Well, let me describe an ad or a meme or maybe it's a viral video or something that would take out Bernie.
And it would go like this.
It's a five-second advertisement, political ad, starts with a black screen, and then you see an EKG heartbeat go...
And then the voiceover says something like, you know, the economy is the best it's ever been.
Why would you ever take a chance?
Don't take a chance.
And then the EKG would just flatline.
So the words would talk about the economy.
See where I'm going here?
So it would be an analogy between the heartbeat.
It's fine. Why would you take a chance with an economy that's the best in the world?
But what would people think?
They would immediately be reminded of Bernie's recent heart attack.
And it's all anybody would talk about in the ad.
Because the ad would be about the economy.
Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It's going great.
Don't do this. Don't flatline the economy.
Right? Five second commercial.
Black screen. Heartbeat.
Voice over. Done.
That's the end of the election.
Because it's so scary.
And it's so right.
It's completely right.
People don't like taking chances with an economy that's working.
If you talk about the risk, it's over.
Alright, here's an update on me.
Remember I told you that Google, through YouTube, seemed to be limiting my YouTube videos and demonetizing them.
Now, when they demonetize them, it means that they don't run ads.
The creator doesn't get paid for the time that people watch it with no ads.
But worse than that, when it's demonetized, it doesn't get recommended by YouTube, so it gets much less awareness.
So I was talking to Google, and I actually got a hold of the group, a very small group, and one person in particular who handles these kinds of questions for Google, for YouTube.
And they're working with me, and apparently they're putting together a A beta program, if you will, that I'm trying to get into, and it looks like I will, in which there'll be some people who might be whitelisted.
In other words, I wouldn't be automatically demonetized because I have a long history of not doing anything that would make me demonetized.
So as long as you have a long history of not crossing that line, you could potentially Once this is implemented, could potentially not be demonetized automatically.
So we'll see how that goes. I'll keep you informed as that goes.
If it happens, it would happen in the spring, I think.
So we're talking about a few months from now.
But if you see my YouTube numbers jump, that's why.
There is a horrible story in the news about a health records company Someone who sells software to doctors, in which the software company worked with an opioid producer.
The news is reporting it's probably Purdue, but that's not confirmed.
And that the software company accepted money from the opioid-making company to have a little screen pop up to suggest more opioids and suggest that somebody manage their pain with opioids.
And it was even...
Created basically to market opioids more aggressively in a sort of clever way, but also to get people to take prescriptions longer.
Now, how evil is that?
Look at the comments.
Every other comment is, oh my god.
Oh my God.
What do you think should be the legal penalty for bribing a software company to push your opioids, which would cause, certainly they would know by then, would cause people to be addicted who didn't need to be addicted?
What should be the penalty for that?
At least life in prison, wouldn't you say?
Now, I think you could argue for the death penalty, but the way society is organized at the moment, it's unlikely you would succeed.
But at least life in prison.
That's one of the most evil things you'll ever see.
I mean, it's just shocking.
Did any of you see that...
The funny video of Chuck Schumer was getting ready to be somber and solemn and give a little speech about the vote about witnesses with impeachment.
And Kamala Harris was standing behind him and joking around with Sherrod Brown.
And Schumer turns around and he has to put up the hand to shush her, like Schumer's acting serious.
He has to shush her happiness.
And if you haven't seen the video, it's very funny because Kamala Harris makes a face.
So Schumer looks at her and hushes her.
But as soon as Schumer turns back toward the audience, Kamala makes a humorous face like a child who's just been scolded by a parent but isn't really sorry about it.
It was actually a pretty funny reaction.
Of course, conservatives are floating that around because it's funny and it makes Kamala Harris look bad and it makes their whole impeachment look ridiculous because they're laughing and joking and only pretending to be solemn.
So, politically, it's a fun little viral video.
But here's the thing.
I did not like Kamala Harris less because of it.
And I'm curious if anybody had the same reaction.
I feel like I'm too biased because I have this prediction that Biden will get nominated, she'll be the vice presidential nomination.
So I know I'm biased.
And I'm just asking if you had the same reaction.
I didn't mind at all.
In other words, she looked kind of funny and authentic.
It was a very authentic moment, and she did it in public on stage, and it was a funny, spontaneous...
It was just funny.
And I haven't seen her actually be funny in a way that I thought was funny.
And I thought she played it off in a way that I kind of liked.
Did anybody have that experience?
Or was it just me? And I'm certainly...
Oh, a few other people did.
Yeah, there are a few other people, and I think most of the people here would not, you know, be naturally supporters of Kamala Harris.
Yeah, okay, a whole bunch of you are saying the same thing.
You know, if you looked at just the social media comments and the way the news was handling it, it was sort of portrayed as a negative, but it looks like a lot of people have the same feeling I did, which was, it was kind of cute, you know, in a good way.
Somebody's saying in the comments, she seemed to be flirting with that guy.
I was going to say that, but I didn't think it was fair.
I'm very much opposed to the attacks on Kamala Harris that are about her past relationships with Willie Brown or anything like that.
I get that it's funny and in social media people do outrageous things and anything about sex is going to get more attention.
I'm just not on board with any of that stuff.
I'm just not on board with that.
Because it's not a standard that I would want any of you to have to live to.
I don't want any of you to live up to the standard of what you did years ago in your sex life or in your personal life or anything.
Just let it go. It's not a good look to be hammering on that.
It doesn't make you look like a good person, and it doesn't make your candidate look like a good person.
If you're a Trump supporter, And you're tweeting about Kamala Harris, her knee pads and all the things you see on social media.
You're not doing a good job for Trump.
Because none of that stuff is making people not want to vote for her.
It just makes you look like you're a certain kind of person and you're part of Trump's brand by talking about him online.
So just think about the look that you're putting out there.
Alright. So there's that.
Did you see the news that it's unconfirmed, but there's a good reason to believe that the Al-Qaeda leader in Yemen was, using the word likely, killed by an airstrike?
Here's my first reaction to that.
Is Trump running out of targets?
Is Trump so successful at fighting terrorism that we're down to the Al-Qaeda leader in Yemen?
I don't know. It feels like all the A targets might be dead.
Maybe it's going down to the second level.
No, I get it. I get it. There's a big war in Yemen, and it's a big hotspot for terrorism.
So even though it's a tiny country, it's important in terms of the war on terror.
But just the way it feels, if you're killing the al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, maybe you're running out of targets.
Maybe it's good news. You all saw the controversy that Mike Bloomberg made it into the next debate, but only because the Democrats changed the rules.
And it appears they changed the rules just for him.
But I don't know if that's true.
Now, that would make sense because Bloomberg has essentially purchased the Democrat Party.
And when I say he's purchased them, what I mean is that he said that even if he doesn't get the nomination, he's still going to be running all these anti-Trump campaigns Almost certainly will support whoever the candidate is, because it's not Trump.
And he's got hundreds of millions of dollars to push in that direction.
So yeah, the Democrat Party is going to do anything Mike Bloomberg wants.
He bought them. They were for sale.
They had a price. He paid it.
He did it in public.
We're watching it happen.
There's no secret here at all.
I'm going to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign, but maybe I wouldn't if he treated me unfairly.
I might ask for a few things.
They're no big deal. A little bit of a rule change.
It's not an unfair rule.
And the rule change was something about number of donors or something.
So they got rid of that in favor of just the poll numbers and his polls have gotten high enough so he's on the stage.
So here's the weird thing about this.
In what world Does the rich old white guy who uses his billions of dollars to control a big part of the media and buy the election How is he the standard bearer of Democrats?
It's just so crazy.
I'm usually not the one who likes to point out the easy hypocrisy stuff, you know, the easy conflicts.
I always think they're just too obvious and they're not really fun because everybody's going to be talking about that.
But it's kind of mind-blowing that the person who is literally the most opposite you could be of the kind of person that the Democrats think is their brand could be their standard bearer.
It's just interesting.
Let's talk about the biggest mistake that Trump has made for persuasion.
This will be the first time you've ever heard this.
So there's nobody in the news who's going to make the point that I'm making unless you hear it after this.
It goes like this.
We're going to be talking about the coronavirus, of course, but there's a new wrinkle to it that I haven't talked about.
First of all, there was a fake news report.
Fake meaning it wasn't the news that was the problem.
It was the scientists. A couple of Indian scientists said they found indicators in the coronavirus that it was a manufactured bioweapon.
It wasn't. I mistakenly tweeted that because it was a couple of scientists.
I thought, well, it's a couple of scientists.
This would be one of the odds that these scientists...
Would see something that's so checkable.
In other words, you don't make a claim that's false.
If it's easy to check, it's false.
And secondly, I don't know, they didn't seem to have any self-interest.
They seemed to be helping.
And it was such a specific claim that there were various HIV-related pieces put into this.
I'm being non-technical here.
And then other experts weighed in and looked at their data and said, no, you're just reading the data wrong.
That's all it was. Turns out they just read the data wrong, didn't have the right context, and that the things they thought they saw was just statistical noise.
So they just weren't good at statistics, apparently.
So that's the first thing.
It was not a bioweapon.
If you saw news yesterday that suggested it was, you can adjust that now.
And here's the hell of a thing.
I think Twitter suspended the website ZeroHedge for reporting on the story incorrectly.
I think that happened.
I need some confirmation, and I don't know if we'll ever have it, if there was any other reason beyond that, but I think Twitter's rules are that they'll suspend things that are sort of dangerously inaccurate.
That news was fake news, and at the point that Twitter understood it to be dangerously inaccurate.
I mean, that's a dangerous piece of fake news.
It really is. They deleted that site from Twitter.
And I don't know if that'll get reversed.
Maybe they would need to delete or revise an article or something.
But I hope it gets reversed, because Zero Hedge is actually a pretty interesting site.
It doesn't mean they're right all the time, but the other sites are not either.
So let me get to Trump's horrible, horrible mistake.
This is one of the biggest mistakes you'll ever see, politically, strategically, and persuasion-wise.
So as you know, I've been complaining that the United States has not immediately closed down incoming flights from China.
Well, it turns out that some of the airlines themselves are starting to close down traffic.
Australia just banned incoming flights.
Hong Kong did. So other countries are doing things.
And I kept asking, why are we not doing that?
Or at least, why isn't the government explaining why we're not doing it?
Yes, as of an hour ago.
Somebody said in the comments, Did we close it down an hour ago?
Did that happen? Can somebody tell me in the comments if that happened?
I don't know if that's true. That might not be true.
So here's why it's dumb.
On the strategy level, political strategy level, it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in my life.
There's no world in which Trump would lose votes if he acted differently.
Too conservatively.
In other words, if he stopped incoming flights more than people thought should have been done, even if it hurt the economy a little bit, it wouldn't hurt it that much because it only affects travelers.
It wouldn't affect trade.
Trade with China would be exactly the same.
And travel probably wouldn't have much of an impact because 30 days later people would make the trips that they postponed.
So it was a As far as I can tell, unless there was corrupt intent, which you always have to suspect in these situations, the corruption being not necessarily Trump's, but something in the government, it is a dumb risk management to not do the thing that's free and then take the risk that's very expensive.
Because if a number of people die, and it could be a very small number, if 10 people die of the coronavirus in the United States, And we can track it back to the fact that the airport wasn't, that the flights weren't locked down sooner.
People will assume that was the case anyway.
That's really going to cost Trump.
So he could lose votes by doing what he did, but he could never lose votes if he went the other way.
Why in the world would a politician in an election year do the thing that could lose him votes when he could do the thing that wouldn't lose him votes?
It's unexplained. And that's why you have to think corruption.
Somewhere, somewhere in the government, there's something going on.
It doesn't mean it's Trump himself, but he's not fixing it.
He's not overriding it.
He has the power, I think.
He's a dictator now.
He has the power. Just kidding.
So far, everything I've said, I've said before.
Here's the new point. I hate to even bring it up.
Because it's sort of devastating.
You know all of the pushback that Trump got with the so-called Muslim ban, right?
So the Muslim ban, which is what his critics called it, he was accused of Just not letting people in because they were different religion or ethnicity or whatever.
Religion mostly. So he was accused of being anti-Muslim.
He's expanded the number of countries, and I don't think they're all majority Muslim countries, but he's expanded them all.
And so he brings up that issue again.
All right, so one of the president's biggest problems Was that it appeared that he was blocking people from coming into the country just because they were Muslim.
That's what the critic said.
It's not what was actually happening, but that's what the critic said.
He had a play with this coronavirus to absolve himself, and he didn't take it.
It's one of the biggest missed opportunities you'll ever see.
Now, let me connect the dots, because so far you don't know what I'm talking about, probably.
The coronavirus is almost perfectly analogous to radical Islamic belief.
Not regular Islamic, mainstream, ordinary Islamic religious person.
I'm talking about just the radical ones who want to kill people.
Because the Muslim population, mostly innocent, It has a little bit of an idea of virus in it that you could call the radical terrorist element.
Just a little bit of a larger population has that problem.
Identical to a big population of Chinese nationalists or people who have been to China, almost all of them do not have the coronavirus.
The vast majority of ordinary Chinese travelers have no coronavirus, but a very small amount.
And we treated the Muslim country ban as if we would treat all the people with the same risk level simply because we can't determine who are the dangerous ones.
We classified the whole group as potentially dangerous just because we can't tell the individuals within it.
And then the coronavirus comes.
It's exactly analogous.
I mean, there are lots of difference in trade agreements and our relationship and things with China.
So there are big differences.
But the way the human mind processes things is that we see, why is this different?
Why is the virus being treated differently in terms of allowing people into the country?
Then the Muslim ban, when in fact both of those are large communities who are overwhelmingly innocent of anything, but just a small amount are infected.
The Chinese, some of them, with that virus.
The Muslim countries that are banned, just a few of them, with terrorism.
Here's the problem. It makes it look racist.
It makes it look racist.
Because if you can't explain to me why those two situations are treated differently, where's my mind going to go?
People keep saying, did it?
Did something happen this morning?
Because I did not see a news report about banning travel.
I saw only that we banned travel to China, so let's check it.
In any event, it took too long, so it doesn't really change what happened.
I'm just looking down...
I don't see it on the headline.
Yeah, I don't see it as a headline.
and Someone needs to catch up.
Well, I just looked at all the CNN headlines and there's nothing there about restricting incoming flights.
So, mandatory quarantines now.
Let's do a fact check on that.
My larger point remains the same.
Because I have assumed all along that we would reach a point where we had to stop the flights.
So the fact that he stopped them does not make it still not a gigantic error.
Because the error was waiting this long.
If the virus takes off in this country, it's just going to look like the greatest political mistake of all time.
But on a persuasion level, he had a chance...
To get rid of his biggest problem.
I would say Trump's biggest problem was that so-called Muslim ban that wasn't really a Muslim ban.
It was about a ban about we don't know who in that group is going to be the dangerous ones.
If he had done just exactly the same thing with the virus, people would say, oh, okay, I get it now.
I get it. Whenever there's a big group and you can't tell which ones are the dangerous ones, you temporarily ban them all until you can sort things out and figure out what's safe.
He could have treated both these situations the same, and it would have absolutely absolved him, at least to some people, it would have absolved him from the claim that the Muslim ban was about Muslims.
Instead, it goes the other way.
One of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen him make, persuasion-wise, because it was free money.
That was free money.
The president should have just looked at that table full of free money and said, I'm just going to temporarily ban things.
I win on the Muslim ban.
I win on being rough on China.
I win on being cautious and protecting the country.
Win, win, win, win, win, win.
And he took the losing path.
I can't explain it.
Unless there's massive corruption somewhere.
It doesn't mean that it's Trump.
It could be whoever's advising him.
It could be Congress, Senate.
I don't know. Could be anybody.
But there's something corrupt going on there.
Alright. Somebody says it's already banned.
So I'm going to go check the news.
There could be a reason that CNN does not have that in the headlines.
I have to check because there's a little confusion about what got banned.
So I'm not sure that those of you who are saying that we've banned those flights might have only banned it in one direction.
But let me check on that. That's a It's an open question.
