Episode 1002 Scott Adams: Today You Learn That All the News is Pretend News
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Content:
Are Dems panicking the economy might recover too soon?
A political wedge versus trying to solve a problem
President Trump issuing social media EO
Jack Dorsey and Twitter fact-checking
Are media covering for Antifa, framing BLM?
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Oh yeah. We got terrible things and funny things and funny terrible things.
We got fake news, real news, but mostly fake news.
And it's the interesting kind, the good kind, the kind that makes you smarter.
Yeah, every one of you will be smarter by the time you're done.
Christina, good morning.
But before we get going, I think you know what we need to do, and it's called the simultaneous zip, and all you need is A cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chile, a sour stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And even the pandemic will be improved with this sip.
Watch this. Can you feel the curve flattening?
Flattening, flattening, sip!
Yep. Yep, I can feel the coronavirus death curve just bending a little bit there with one sip.
So here is a little tip for you.
This is a retail store tip.
You can take this one to the bank.
If you're going to start a retail store, don't name it Target.
Well, if you're watching the news today, you're laughing.
But if you don't know what the news is today, there's a Target store that got ravaged in, I guess, Minnesota.
Because they're having riots and looting over the tragic death of the man who was killed by the police there when they put their knee on his neck.
And the funniest comment that I saw today, I just tweeted, is from a user, FrankieFriday98.
And he suggests a new rule.
And if you want to learn a rule of humor, this is a perfect example.
So this is a perfect tweet from FrankieFriday98.
And he says that the rule should be, I'm paraphrasing because I'm not looking at it, he says the new rule should be that if police kill anybody in your town, the local target has to give away all of its products because it's going to happen anyway and you might as well do it without getting your windows broken.
And this is The reason this makes me laugh is because it's perfect joke form.
Because it makes sense.
At the same time, it doesn't make any sense.
So if you can put those two together, you've got a joke.
That's what causes the laugh reflex.
Because you say to yourself, oh, wait a minute.
If they're going to steal all the stuff of the Target anyway, you might as well just make that the rule.
If the police kill somebody, you just have to open Target and say, all right.
Do what you want to do.
I don't know why that's so funny, but it is.
I tweeted a great article and thread from Andres I told you you should be following him.
So look at my Twitter feed this morning.
It's toward the top. And he tells you about the common errors that people are making looking at the coronavirus studies and data from different places.
And it's a real good overview.
If you think you understand what's going on with the data, read all the mistakes that you can easily make.
And you might find that we don't know anything about anything.
I think we're getting close to the point where we can't compare anything to anything and we just don't know anything because none of our comparisons are valid.
There's always an apple to an orange going on.
Anyway, so that's worth looking at.
One of the funniest stories is that Democrats are getting panicked that the economy might come back too quickly.
It might come back too quickly And before the election.
Now when I say come back, I don't mean all the way back.
That would be much too soon to be all the way back.
But what people are expecting is a sharp sort of the beginning of a V, and the rest of the V shape would take, you know, it might take a year to get the V finished.
It could be two years. But the first part of the V might happen quickly, meaning that just people go back to work for those businesses that didn't get closed down permanently, and things get back pretty quickly.
So the panic is that Trump is going to be going into Election Day with an economy that the GDP has basically doubled because it's coming off a low base.
Now what's funny about this is that for the past four years, what have Obama supporters been saying about the economy?
Obama supporters have been making the claim that Obama did even better than Trump.
Because if you look at some of the numbers, like percentages and growth and stuff, it was better under Obama.
But what did they leave out?
They always leave out the same thing.
That Obama came into office when the economy was at the bottom.
And when your economy is at the very bottom, the first part of the recovery is the easy part.
It's people who are already trained to work.
They just go back to work.
That part's easy. So Obama presided over what I'd call the easy part of the recovery, meaning that your percentage gain from the bottom is always going to look good.
And so illegitimately, sort of going back to Andrea's point about how we're not good about analyzing data, so people have illegitimately said, but hey, you say Trump's doing good for the economy?
Look at Obama's numbers.
They're better. But of course, that's an apple to an orange.
Because how quickly you recover from a bottom should be impressive.
How much you can add to the top is a lot harder.
And Trump did that.
So Trump was adding to a fairly strong economy.
That's the hard part.
That's the hardest part to get right.
And I'm not even sure if you reversed the two presidents.
You had them, you know, serve each other's terms.
I don't know if that would have worked.
It felt like they were both sort of suited for their time.
But anyway, that's another story. The point is that we may have an impressive-looking semi-recovery by November, and that looks like bad news for Democrats.
And the fact that that would look like bad news is just, well, it's a head-shaker.
All right. Are you ready to have your brain...
Spinning in your skull.
I'm going to give you a simple suggestion that if I do it right, will make you say something like, Why didn't anybody suggest that before?
So that's my challenge.
My challenge is that as soon as you hear this suggestion, you're going to say, Oh my goodness.
Why didn't anybody say this before?
Now, this is not my original suggestion.
This is just something I saw on Twitter from a Twitter user who made this suggestion.
And when I read it, I had the feeling that you're going to have in a minute, which is, uh, why is that so smart?
And yet nobody has said this yet.
And it goes like this.
We're talking about mail-in ballots and we're talking about the dangers of voting because of coronavirus.
Here's the suggestion.
You ready? Have election day be election week.
And you just spread it out.
Just election week.
Because just about everybody can get to the election place within a week.
Now maybe you would spread it out by the letter in your last name or something.
So I'm going to watch your comments.
Right? I'm watching the comments.
Oh my goodness, why didn't anyone say this before?
Somebody says no, but without a reason.
More time to cheat? More time to cheat?
What's that mean? Great idea.
I said this a month ago, somebody says.
Not new, been saying that for years.
Somebody says I said that years ago.
Well, I'll bet a lot of individuals have said it, but why is it not in the national conversation?
Have you seen it on the news?
Now, if you've said this in past years, you are probably talking about it with less urgency.
At the moment, we have a medical reason.
There's a completely valid, completely obvious, completely agreed upon medical reason.
Somebody says they do that in Florida?
I'm not aware of that.
Maybe for local elections?
Somebody says we already have that for early voting.
Well, anyway, the larger point of it is, why was this not part of the national conversation?
Who exactly would be opposed to spreading election day to a week so everybody's safer?
I just don't see how anybody would oppose that.
All right. That kind of messes with your head, doesn't it?
Just a little bit, because you say to yourself, really?
We got all the way to here, and that's the first time I've heard that?
Because that's how I felt when I heard it the first time.
It's like, what? Alright, so we have another one of those days where all of our biggest news stories have something in common.
They didn't happen.
All the news, pretty much fake news this week.
Now when I say it's all fake news, I mean the interpretations of it.
It is true that a target is on fire somewhere in Minnesota.
So the facts of this is on fire, this person died, those are all facts.
But the way we're interpreting it, just ridiculous.
For example, there's the Joe Scarborough story about the president's allegations that Joe Scarborough killed an employee.
Now, I rush to say, there's no evidence that Joe Scarborough ever killed an employee.
Which, I can't stop laughing when I think about it, because it's so audacious.
It's so ridiculous. And you know the President doesn't believe it.
Of course he doesn't believe it.
And he doesn't say he believes it.
He simply passes on the rumor, make sure you've heard it.
So, The fact that anybody takes this seriously is the funny part of the story.
The funny part of the story is that the media even reports on it.
I mean, that should have been, you know, one or two tweets by the president in which the media should have looked at it and said, oh, that's funny.
He doesn't mean that. And just ignore it.
They could have just ignored it when it became the biggest thing in the country, which, of course, perfectly plays into Trump's strategy, I would assume, which is simply to put some pressure on Joe Scarborough.
I can't stop laughing at that one.
Alright, so the Scarborough thing is based on something that just didn't happen.
Alright, how about another one?
How about all of the news that was yesterday and last night and today is going to be all about race wars.
There's like all this racial tension.
Is that what's happening?
Do you feel that?
Do you feel that the story about, I can't remember his name, George?
Is that his last name? The African-American man who was killed by the police officer in Minnesota recently.
Now, of course, that happened.
And then the media and social media have combined to try to turn this into a race story.
Do you know what this isn't?
This is so not a race story.
This is the least racial story of any story that's ever been told.
Why? Because there's nobody on the other side of it.
It's a complete fake story.
There are no people who think that the police officer acted appropriately.
There's nobody in the world who thinks that was okay.
I mean, if you've actually watched the video, nobody thinks that was okay.
Now, there are some people who might be saying, I've seen the video of the initial stop, I've seen the video of where the knee was on the neck, but there's still sort of a gap missing there, which is what happened just before it happened.
Now, maybe you're waiting to get the full story, but I'm not sure that's going to tell you something that you need to know, because the part you watched was bad enough.
But the point is, there's no disagreement on this story.
If anybody is trying to sell you that black citizens are on one side and white citizens are on another side of the story, it's just not true.
Everybody's on the same side.
Now, let me tell you how you know that this is all political and not actually social.
The difference being that if it were a social problem that people were trying to really solve, like they actually wanted a solution, they would do it a different way.
But if it's a political problem, you don't necessarily want it solved, because you want the issue as much as you could use it.
So here is my analysis of why you know that this is not a real issue, Meaning that people are not actually trying to solve it.
They're using it as a political club.
Here's how. Because the way you would solve this police, what seems to be a problem of, at least sometimes, police abusing the people they stop.
How would you best solve that?
If you just wanted to solve it, and you didn't want to make it a political thing, how would you do it?
Let me answer the question.
You would do it the same way that AIDS activists got straight people to care about AIDS. They would tell them it's their problem, too.
Right? The genius thing that the LGBTQ community, mostly gay men, I think, did brilliantly They made everybody understand that this wasn't a gay problem.
You can get it in a variety of ways, and therefore it's everybody's problem.
Once you've redefined it as everyone's problem, what does everyone do?
Well, then everyone says, how do we solve the problem?
You get everyone on board.
You get more funding, you get more attention, you get more everything.
You just got to get everybody on board.
It was the most brilliant part of the AIDS strategy, is to make sure that the country didn't think it was limited to one group, and then you could solve it.
What would the black community do if they wanted to solve what they see as, and I don't have any data to confirm or disconfirm, but what they would see as the police acting too roughly?
What would be the best way to solve it?
Simple. Give us statistics about how many white people are getting killed by police.
Right? If you told me, hey, by the way, this isn't even a racial problem.
No matter who gets stopped by the police, some number of them are getting killed for not doing much that deserve to get killed.
Why don't you just make it a people problem?
Just make it a people problem.
I'll help. Because as soon as you make it a people problem, then you start talking about solutions.
You say, okay, is it a problem that we don't have enough body cams?
So maybe we could be part of the solution of helping local police fund more body cams.
I wouldn't oppose that.
Would you? If black people want to solve this, just tell white people it's their problem too.
Because it is. You don't think any white people have been killed by police?
I'm sure they have.
And I'm sure that there are plenty of cases where those families of the white people said, I don't think this was fair.
So, as soon as you make it a racial problem, you're really signaling that you're not trying to solve the problem.
You're trying to have a political wedge.
If you want to solve the problem, we'll help.
I've literally offered to help publicly on this very problem.
Not the Minnesota one, but the police problem.
Way back when Kaepernick was making his war public protests, I was saying, well, how can I help?
Why don't we just treat it like it's a problem that has maybe a clever solution?
I'll help. So, if the black citizens of this country want everybody else to help them on this topic, I think we're all ready to do it.
Who exactly is on the other side?
So it's a big old fake story that there's some kind of racial tension over this.
There is racial tension, but it's illegitimate.
It's illegitimate because we're all on the same side on this story.
We're all on the same side.
Let's not pretend we're not.
Now, as to the looting and the rioting and stuff, I don't think you can really associate that with the event.
Because the tragic event can act as a trigger.
It's like a fake because.
But I think it had a lot to do with people wanting a television.
There was no police there.
It was a warm summer night.
Tensions are high anyway because of the lockdown.
It was just a bunch of things came together and there was this fake spark.
It's like, oh, let's use this as our excuse to get some big TVs.
So I would treat the rioting and the looting just as crime, just ordinary crime.
I just don't think you should.
Have you seen all the videos of the actual looting?
I can't stop watching them.
So there are a lot of camera phone types of video.
And the funniest one is there's a whole bunch of people with masks on to which I say to myself, okay, well those are the people who know how to do some looting.
They're looting right.
But there's one video where you can see all the looters in the background.
Most of them are masked.
They have hoods on and stuff.
And you see this one white woman running by with an ugly lamp from Target.
And because there aren't that many videos, this one is kind of prominent.
She's not wearing a mask.
So there's a 100% chance that she's being recognized by everybody that she knows who saw this video.
And she's there running out of the store looting.
But Ellie Alexander said the funniest thing that I've been laughing about for a day.
And she doesn't even have a loot right.
She's a terrible looter.
She can't get her looting right.
Which is so true.
I'd like to think that if I were in that situation, I could loot a little more effectively than she's looting.
Her looting needs a lot of work.
Alright, what else is a fake story?
Okay, here's another one. Trump's ignoring the Constitution.
So he's talking about doing an executive order about social media.
And maybe we know what that is by now, but I haven't seen any details.
So we don't know what that will look like.
But, of course, the critics are saying that Trump is ignoring the Constitution, being a dictator, of which, of course, is a completely false story.
Because there isn't the slightest chance...
That whatever Trump does with this executive order, there isn't the slightest chance that it won't be tested against all of our legal and constitutional standards.
Because of course it will.
And he's not going to stop it.
He'll fight for his side.
He might take it to court.
Maybe it becomes a Supreme Court thing.
But in the end, the one thing I can guarantee you...
Whichever way the courts and the law go, so too will the Trump administration go.
So it's a complete fake news that the president is looking to violate the Constitution, when indeed he's doing exactly the opposite, which is trying to work within it.
You know, he might poke every door and push every button, and some of them might not work, but he's very clearly trying to find solutions within the framework of the Constitution and our legal system.
And I don't know how you could imagine in your imaginary world that anything else is happening.
There isn't any chance that this is going to become some kind of extra-constitutional thing.
No chance. I mean, really, there's zero chance.
But people are treating that like, yeah, that's happening.
That's happening. He's ignoring the Constitution.
All right. The other big story, of course, is the Twitter fact-checking.
Which, as of today, my understanding is that's all fake news as well.
Fake news, not in the sense that there was not a fact-check banner put on the president's tweet.
That part's true. It's, of course, the interpretation that's wrong.
And here's my current understanding.
I think this might evolve, but here's my current understanding.
Of what Twitter did and what Jack Dorsey is saying about it, which is completely different than what the news is reporting.
So I believe that everything you've heard about why Twitter did what it did is fake news.
I think it's fake news on Fox News and it's fake news on CNN. I think it's just all fake news.
Because here's what Twitter was attempting to do and how they explain it.
And then compare that to how the news has handled it.
So the news has largely handled it as on CNN they're saying the president made some claims about mail-in votes and they were fake.
So Twitter called it down and then pointed to accurate information.
So that's what CNN is.
That's sort of their take on it.
That's fake news.
Fox's take on it is that it's just more of You know, anti-conservative bias, and why are they picking on the president when there's so many other fake things to do?
So it's obviously just the beginning of what will be more bias.
That, I believe, also is fake news.
So I think the way it's being handled on both the left and the right are completely different, but they're both completely fake news.
Here's what I think is the real story.
And I'll give this an 80% confidence level.
Because I think you should know that there's a solid 20% chance that this will all be different by tomorrow.
And tomorrow I'll be telling you, I got it all wrong.
Now I know something more.
But my current understanding is this.
This is based on Jack Dorsey's tweets on it.
And I want to read them because you need to get his exact wording to know what I'm talking about.
So first of all, Jack said, fact check that there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company.
And that's me.
So Jack is taking all responsibility, and he says, please leave our employees out of this, because, as you know, a specific employee was sort of in social media and on the news as the person responsible for this function.
But Jack accurately He states that he's the boss, and the boss takes responsibility, and I think we all appreciate that.
So while I don't think this will necessarily stop people from going after employees of Twitter, I think we all appreciate when the boss backs up the employees, right?
So I think you can appreciate it on a leadership level, That you want your leader to back up your employees, because the employees are doing what you told them to do.
And if they make a mistake, that's sort of an internal problem, right?
So, so far, I think we could say, alright, alright, maybe you still want to say things about individual employees, and I think there is a story there, because you always have to look at the bias and stuff.
But I think you could also appreciate, at the same time, that a leader of an organization wants to back the employees, and so he did.
Alright, so that's one tweet. I don't think we have to make too much of that one.
Then he goes on, this does not make us, quote, an arbiter of truth.
I think that was referring to, maybe it was Zuckerberg's comment that Zuckerberg didn't want Facebook to be an arbiter of truth.
And so let me read the rest of this.
This does not make us an arbiter of truth.
Our intention is, Is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute.
Okay. So he says the intention is to highlight things that are in dispute and then connect the dots.
The way I read this is that you would see all the dots.
You would see the dots on both sides.
Now remember yesterday I was saying I'd be happy, just as a user, if something got labeled fake So long as equally prominently, and the equally prominent part is sort of the tricky part, because a user interface, you can't make everything equally prominent.
It just can't be done, you know, logically.
So your user interface on Twitter is going to have to use some magic to make it feel like you're getting equal prominence of the fact check that says it's false, but also the sources that say, no, no, it's not false.
Here's our sources. So Jack seems to be signaling with this tweet that the intention is to show both sides of disputed tweets.
Do you have a problem with that?
Would you have a problem, let me ask you in the comments, would you have a problem if it could be done?
I don't know if it could be done, because it's just hard to execute that.
But if it could be done, that Twitter would flag things that are disputed, but clearly show both sides, would you be okay with that?
Because I actually would.
I would be 100% okay with that.
Not only that, but I would think that would be positive for conservatives.
Very positive for conservatives.
Because what are you most worried about?
If you're a conservative or a Republican, you're most worried that the other side is not hearing the story.
Because you hear what the mainstream media says, you, if you're conservative, and then you also hear what conservatives say, so you're seeing a well-rounded picture.
I talk about a phrase that I've been using, the poorly educated.
The poorly educated, by my definition, just for fun, is anybody who's just in one silo of news, either the left only, or they only see the news on the right.
There's less of a silo there, because, again, the left's news is more ubiquitous.
You see it everywhere. So, I would say that that at least shows the intention of Of moving in the right direction, of showing both sides.
Now the current implementation doesn't do that, does it?
So it feels like this is a process that's being worked out in Twitter.
In other words, they don't have a final answer.
They're A-B testing.
They're putting some stuff out.
You'll probably see a few new looks.
I wouldn't be surprised if you see three or four looks in the coming year just to make sure that you are highlighting things fairly.
So I would first of all give them a little flexibility.
I think you should allow them some flexibility to work through this because it's pretty clear they're hearing the complaints.
I don't think there's any I think I can say with complete confidence there's no chance that Twitter, and Jack in particular, are not hearing very clearly what the issues are.
And it's also true that they're clearly trying to work through them in a way that will make most people happy, because that's their business model.
They don't really have the business if they're only catering to half of the country.
So clearly he wants everybody to use Twitter, and that's, duh.
So I would give him a little time to work through this, which is not to say that you should take the pressure off, at least the social news-related pressure of what you would like to see done, So I think the pressure is constructive.
Friction is often constructive, and I think this is very much a constructive friction situation.
So if you can step back from the carnage for a moment and just sort of look at it from 30,000 feet, there's something pretty good happening.
Or potentially. Potentially there's something really good happening, but you need a little distance from it to be able to see it.
Here's the good part. So far, if I've done this correctly, most of you are mad at me right now.
Have I done that correctly?
A lot of you should be a little bit mad, because you're not quite buying what I'm saying.
But here's the punchline.
Here's the kicker. Jack goes on with his third tweet, and he says, Per our civic integrity policy, which is an actual published policy, The tweets yesterday, and he's talking about the president's tweets about mail-in ballots, the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don't need to register to get a ballot.
And then, parenthetically, he says, only registered voters receive ballots.
And we're updating the link on that to clarify that.
To which I say, what?
What? Because isn't this completely different than what you thought it was?
Did you not think that this was the beginning of Twitter?
Hold on. Did you not think that this whole mail-in ballot fact-checking thing was the beginning of Twitter fact-checking opinion?
You did, didn't you?
You thought that they were going to start fact-checking just ordinary political opinion.
And then you say to yourself, well, how come they haven't fact-checked the fine people hoax?
How come they haven't fact-checked the Joe Scarborough thing?
Why'd they let that go?
The other side says.
Why not fact-check this and that?
And you're confused, right?
Aren't you confused? Because there are all these things that could be fact-checked, but why did they pick this one thing?
And the answer is, Jack told you.
He picked the one thing because it's a special case.
The special case is saying something that would reduce voter turnout.
Is this the first time you're hearing that?
Probably is, right?
Are you against social media calling out something that would give people misinformation that would cause fewer people to vote?
No, you're not.
You are not against that.
You are not opposed to social media correcting misinformation with the purpose of increasing turnout.
Hold on. Now I believe there was one other thing that got fact-checked by Twitter.
Maybe you need to fact-check me on this.
But you saw the picture of the police officer who...
Looks like he murdered a guy in Minnesota.
And then there was fake news that there was a picture of him wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
I think Twitter also called out that as a fake picture.
Now, look at the two things that...
And I need a fact check on that.
But look at the two things that Twitter has identified.
And see if you can find the pattern.
They've identified...
A statement from the president that could cause people not to register to vote because the specific problem was the president suggested that everybody would get a mail-in ballot no matter what.
The problem is if you believe that you might not register to vote and that would decrease the number of people voting.
Would it decrease the number of only Democrats voting?
Nope. Would it decrease the number of Democrats and Republicans voting?
Yeah. Yeah, that's the whole problem.
The whole problem is it has nothing to do with politics.
The whole problem is it's a fact that was wrong.
And if you believe that wrong fact, you might not register to vote.
So, you might hate this, but I'm 100% in favor of Twitter's reaction on this, calling it fake.
I'm going to back Twitter on this.
Because no matter what this source is, whether it comes from the President of the United States, or it comes from Joe Biden, or anyone else, if anyone publishes something on social media that is wrong information that would cause somebody not to register or not to vote, yeah. Yeah, I'm completely in favor of calling that out.
Is there anybody here who's not in favor of that?
Let's say, hypothetically, it was the only thing.
If it's the only thing that got called that, would you be in favor of that?
I think you would.
Because somebody says it's a flimsy excuse, you're going to have to do better.
You're going to have to do better in your counter-argument.
If all you're saying is, I don't believe it, it's a flimsy excuse, it's not good enough, well, you're going to have to explain why Jack pointed to a previously written document that completely supports what they did.
I think the news has completely botched it, both on the left and the right.
The news should be that Twitter is trying a new process and it's not working right.
If you ask Twitter, hey, did that first fact check work just the way you wanted it to?
What do you think they would say?
I think they'd say it didn't work.
I think.
Don't you think so?
I think they would say it didn't work.
We're trying to fix it.
Remember, my standard for judging people is always the same.
It's not about if they made a mistake, because that's all of us.
We're all making mistakes all the time.
But you can judge people by how they respond.
So we don't know the full response, because this is a process.
But the initial response is to change the label on it so it's more specific that the only thing they're calling out is Is that the fact about you should register or you're not going to get a mail-in ballot?
If they clarify that as their only problem, I'm not too bad with that.
I'm not too bad with that.
I think there's room to go.
They still need to put counterarguments and stuff.
But here's the thing.
The way it's being reported is that Twitter was complaining about the President's statement That mail-in ballots have an opportunity for fraud.
That's what you thought the news was that Twitter fact-checked the president saying that mail-in ballots cause fraud.
And that didn't happen.
That actually just didn't happen.
It was reported that way on both the left and the right, which I usually tell you means it's true.
But once you see Jack's explanation, you say, oh, That's actually a pretty clear standard.
If the standard makes people less likely to know how to vote, the process, yeah, I'm okay with that.
Now, what about the photograph?
So the other one was a photograph of the wrong person, which is pretty dangerous.
I mean, that photograph of the wrong person wearing a MAGA hat, do you, as many of you are conservatives, many of you are Trump supporters, did you want that photo?
To stay on Twitter without a fact check?
Because that's not good for you.
If you've ever put on a MAGA hat, you don't want to see the guy who just murdered a black guy incorrectly being labeled as somebody who wears a MAGA hat.
You don't want that.
Now, what do the photograph and the voting registration thing have in common?
They do have something in common.
And what they have in common is those are really basic just facts.
And they're not opinions.
What is the Joe Scarborough murdered somebody?
Speculation and opinion.
Did they stop the speculation or the opinion?
They did not. They did not.
If you look at the full breadth of political thought, have they tried to fact check the fine people hoax?
They have not. Because that's sort of an interpretation Even though you could point to the transcript and show that it's a wrong interpretation.
But that's sort of an interpretation.
It looks to be, and I don't know this yet, but it looks to be that where they're heading is that they're not going to fact check interpretations no matter how obviously wrong they are.
It does look like they're going to fact check facts.
But also maybe show you both sides so you can decide whether the fact is a fact.
Now the photograph was just a fact that was wrong.
The information about the registration is a fact that was wrong.
Here's the other thing that both of them have in common.
Neither the left nor the right would disagree with what I just said.
Nobody on the left or the right thinks that that photograph was the right guy.
Now. I mean, now that we know.
And nobody on the left or the right thinks that we should have bad information about how you register to vote.
There's nobody on the other side.
If the only thing that Twitter fact checks are facts for which nobody's on the other side, are you going to have a problem with that?
Now, obviously, they blew the first iteration.
But if you've had any experience with interfaces or building software or trying to build a product for the public, how unusual is it that your first version doesn't work?
It's pretty common.
So I'd give them a little time to work this out.
Now, will anybody let go of this?
No, I don't expect the President or anybody else to let go of it, because it's such a good political season thing to do.
Now, if you wanted to say that social media is doing bad things to you and you don't want it to happen, you should definitely look at the following and unfollowing problem.
Because the problem of being automatically unfollowed, that is 100% happening.
There isn't any chance in the world that people aren't being automatically unfollowed.
I just don't know if anybody knows why.
But that's real.
That part's absolutely real.
So we should be pushing on that, not on fact-checking facts for which both the left and the right agree is not facts.
If they push it into the opinion...
Well then, now we've got a real problem.
If you see Twitter fact-checking hyperbole, speculation, opinion, or even really outright obvious lies, as long as they're obvious lies, I don't think they need to fact-check that stuff.
I think they should be out of that business, because then they would be arbiters of truth.
Now let's look at this one statement.
Jack says, this does not make us arbiters of truth.
Are they an arbiter of truth to tell you that you have to be registered to get a mail-in vote?
No. They're not arbiters.
They just passed the law.
They're not arbitering anything.
Nobody even disagrees with that.
Are they arbiters of truth about whether that photograph of the guy in the hat is true or not true?
No. They're not arbitring anything.
That's not a word, but you know what I mean.
They're just telling you what both sides agree.
It's not the person.
That's it. So, most of our news today is fake, as you can see.
All right. That's enough on that story.
Joe Biden is being mocked for...
He made some comment about Delaware declaring its independence as a state, I guess, on December 7th.
And they said, it isn't just D-Day.
And apparently, December 7th, he was confusing with Pearl Harbor Day...
And it's not the day that Delaware was independent either, so just the whole thing was confusing.
But sure, Joe Biden's your guy.
So you want some more fake news?
Here's some more fake news.
Democrats want Joe Biden to be their leader.
You don't believe that, do you?
Trump said grabbing women by the blah blah blah, they let you do it.
Is it fact or opinion?
What? I mean, it's a fact that he said it.
I don't understand the question.
Alright. So, doesn't it feel like progress that our biggest race problem in 2020...
If you had to say, what was the biggest racial issue in 2020?
We had a bunch of them.
Everything from... Governor Northerman, blackface, to Jussie Smollett.
There's always lots of them.
But I would say that the biggest one is maybe this one.
Because you've got your riots, it's closer to elections, so everything's accentuated.
But is it not incredibly good news that our biggest race problem actually has everybody on the same side?
Is it really a race problem if everybody agrees?
Like I said before, it's sort of a good sign.
Mike Cernovich has been calling out that when we see the pictures of the rioters, it's being sort of cast as Black Lives Matter are causing all the problems.
But it looks like it's Antifa.
It looks like Antifa might be causing the problems and Black Lives Matter might be getting a little bit framed.
Might be getting a little bit framed by Antifa.
And just from what I can see from the videos, there is something to that claim.
Now, I don't know if the framing is some kind of intentional act or it's just happening, but I think the way the media is covering it, they seem to be covering for Antifa as if they're not even there.
And they seem to be emphasizing the racial part, which is completely fake.
It's not fake that people are mad at the police in Minnesota.
That part's real. But to think that that's a racial problem, that's just a media invention.
Alright. So, that's my key to you.
If you want... You got my blood pressure up this morning.
Which part? Alright, so I... I gave you a lot of stuff this morning.
I want to see which parts of this got you most worked up.
Because I think it's always hard to find out that everything you thought about the news is wrong.
It's just one of those days where pretty much all the big stories are just fake.
The home corporation of Target is getting pummeled.
Where is the home corporation?
The other side won't take yes for an answer.
That's exactly what's happening.
Yeah, they won't take yes for an answer.
Somebody said, this is why Kaepernick took a knee and you all condemned that.
Nope. Nope.
Whoever just said that. So they're saying, this is why Kaepernick took a knee and we all condemned it.
I'm I am prepared to believe that, but that's not in evidence.
Because what's not in evidence is how many white people have been killed by police.
I think you'd find that there are more white people getting murdered by police than black, even as a percentage of stops.
I think you'd find that.
So, if this was a story of, oh, there it is again, only black people are killed by police, Well, I would totally agree with you.
In that case, I'd say Kaepernick was completely right.
Should be looked into. Now, from day one, I said, it's a big issue, and we should look into it and take it seriously.
So I've always been pro-Kaepernick in terms of surfacing the issue.
The way he did it, you could argue, blah, blah, blah.
But in terms of surfacing an issue that is of great concern to a lot of people, he did a good job on it.
But the part that's missing is that I'm not sure this is a race problem.
It might be. I'd be open to some data that would suggest that is true.
But it looks like a police training problem on top of maybe some bad apples, on top of the media likes to spin it a different way.
It looks like a problem for all of us.
You missed the hat.
You misread the hat, Scott.
I didn't misread any hats.
Maybe you joined us late, but I know what I didn't do is misread any hats.
Somebody says, Scott is wrong.
Twitter made a new excuse with revising the correction.
How do you know? Is that based on your mind reading?
I think it's completely fair to suspect things of people.
But if you're saying, ah, I can read Twitter's minds, and what they did was they really wanted to just fact-check the president in general, but they're backing up and they're trying to sell it like they really only meant to fact-check the fact.
You can't rule it in and you can't rule it out, because you don't know what people are privately thinking.
But is it completely consistent With everything we observe, that what they intended was to get rid of that just voting fact that may have caused people to vote less.
Their story is consistent with observation.
That's the only thing you know.
You don't know what they're thinking.
The way he did it was the main reason he got the pushback.
You mean, are you talking about Jack?
I think I feel as if Twitter would agree with the public that the first attempt to do a fact-check, I think they would agree it didn't work.
So if you're arguing, hey, Twitter, that didn't work, well, you just agreed with them.
They observed the same thing you observed.
It didn't work. So it looks like they're changing it.
So let them change it.
Give them a little bit of space.
Because they may be heading in the right direction.
You'll have plenty of time to complain.
The dude's hat said, make America white again.
You sound like you are in the...
You have a...
You're poorly educated if you believe that that was the policeman.
So let me say it if anybody joined late.
The photo of the policeman wearing a hat with a racist thing on it is not the same person as the policeman.
It is now known beyond a doubt it's a different person in that picture.
We know who the other person is.
He has a long history.
He's a well-known character.
It's not him. So if you believe that that guy in the hat was the police officer, then you are poorly educated.
Now, I don't mean in terms of college or school.
You're poorly educated because it means you've only been looking at one side of the political conversation.
If you had looked at both sides, it's very available information that that's a fake picture.
It's very available. So if you didn't know it, ask yourself if you're following the right people on social media.
Ask yourself if maybe you should sample the other side and see what's going on.
Trump did not say registration is not needed.
That was a misinterpreted by Jack.
I disagree with your statement because the fact that it was ambiguous is all that Twitter needed.
If it was ambiguous, it was still worth a fact check.
And I read it as ambiguous.
So you are technically correct that the president did not state as a positive statement, you don't need to register, you can still get one of these.
He did not say that directly.
But I also read it as, oh, you can see it that way.
I can see that you can see it that way.
And so he says, let's face it, 80% of Americans don't give a shit about this.
That's true for most things.
Somebody says, he didn't say that, idiot.
I don't know who's the idiot, but...
The hat actually said that, but not the cop.
I know what that... Oh, the hat said...
Okay, got it.
So somebody was correcting me on what the hat said.
It did not say MAGA on the hat.
You're right. But it was a red hat.
So that is correct.
So, all right, I'm hearing you in the comments.
You were trying to tell me that it wasn't...
You were not telling me you were confused about who it was.
You are correcting me about the statement on the hat.
So I take that correction as correct.
So you can stop correcting me because I accept that correction.
Somebody says, Scott was poorly educated when he saw the Covington Kids video.
No, that is an incorrect use of the term poorly educated.
The both sides, the left and the right, reported the Covington kid the same way.
So if you were fully educated and you'd seen all the news coverage, you would still be wrong, but not because you didn't sample all the coverage.
So you can still be wrong even looking at all the news, if they both get it wrong.
The ballots are sent to addresses, not voters, no verification needed.
Yeah, I'm... You labeled your podcast with my name, Kent Heck and Lively.
Did I? Somebody says, Jack Dorsey is a leftist.
Don't trust the control police.
Let me tell you a myth that many people on the right are under.
There's this weird myth that there's somebody on the left who doesn't like freedom.
I don't think that's true. I don't think there's anybody on the left who only wants control.
And they want to limit your freedom, and they need to be your mommy and tell you what to do.
That's just bullshit. There is not anybody like that.
There are certainly people who have political preferences, and there are lots of individual things that seem to sum up to that.
But no, there's nobody who's saying, I want to control people.
All I care about is control.
That's not a real thing.
See, the lady, Newsom said, everyone will be mailed a ballot.
But...
So, there are two questions here.
One is whether Twitter's fact check was correct, and the other is whether it was legitimate to try to do a fact check on that point.
I think it's legitimate to do a fact check on the point, But whether they got it right or not, that's why you show both sides.
That's the whole point of making sure that you surface arguments on both sides.
Alright, the poorly educated only took the initial Covington report and ran with it.
Now, I think I'll just start blocking anybody who says the Covington situation is similar to the poorly educated.
Those are not in any way related.
The poorly educated, again, is if you've only looked at one silo and not the other news silo, you would be poorly educated.
You'd be half educated. But if you look at them both and they tell you the same news and it's wrong, that's not poorly educated.
That's just the news was wrong.
Somebody said, you were like that.
Somebody says, you were like that just before I blocked them.
Let's see. Let's see if anybody else wants to get blocked.
Nope, you're wrong on that.
They just don't say it out loud.
I'm going to block you for being a mind reader.
So whoever says that they can read the minds of strangers, we don't need to hear.
Anybody else? Anybody else need a block?
Have you ever studied communism?
I don't know where that question is going.
Control is a real thing.
Yeah. Control is a real thing.
And you just got blocked.
Yeah. It's just not an argument that's...
I don't even want to be around it.
It's just so useless.
In the real world, people have individual goals and they have individual things they want, but nobody is fighting for the concept of control.
That's not a thing. Are there really both sides to facts?
Well, there are in the sense that we can't agree on them, so yes.
Alright, so somebody here putting thoughts into my head.
You get a block. It's okay to say your thoughts.
I always welcome your opinions.
But what I block for is when people tell me my opinion.
You don't need to tell me my opinion in public.
I'm the only one who gets to say that.
If you tell me my opinion, you get blocked.
I can tell you my opinion, and you can tell me your opinion, and you'll never get blocked for that.
Unless it's some kind of weird Nazi thing.
All right. Somebody says, I love your anger.
Yeah, I never would have anticipated that my anger would be a selling point, but it's...
