Episode 1034 Scott Adams: Tulsa Rally, Oxygen on Mars, Chinese Election Interference, Racism Strategy
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Raz Simone, more complicated than reported
Kamala reemerges, retrained, polished by image professionals
Whiteboard: Equality of GOP/Dems
CNN Harry Enten's robocalls hypothesis
AOC, China and a Tic Toc prank
Impressions on President Trump's Tulsa rally
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heartfelt hey everybody Come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Yes, it is.
And you came to the right place.
And before we get going, what do we need?
That's right. You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Happy Father's Day. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's going to spike every part of your chemistry of your body.
It's going to be good. It's going to be great.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Uh-huh.
Now, I'd like you to play a game with me that I call COVID Cancelled or Dead.
Alright? That's the game.
It's called COVID Cancelled or Dead.
And the way you play it is you see a celebrity trending on Twitter and you say, let's see, who's trending on Twitter?
Justin Bieber. Is it because he has COVID, he's cancelled, or he's dead?
Who's got to guess before we check?
COVID, cancelled, or dead?
Let's check.
Justin Bieber, oh my.
Cancelled. A little bit of Me Too action going on there with Justin Bieber, so...
COVID Cancelled or Dead.
You can play it every morning. Every morning there's a new celebrity and I say, hmm, this one.
COVID Cancelled or Dead.
And been pretty good so far.
Alright. It's pretty catchy, isn't it?
COVID Cancelled or Dead?
Come on. You're going to be saying this all day long.
You know you are. If you have not watched my new video series, Called How To Do Things Like A Boomer.
I pinned one of the videos to it.
I'll probably have more of them in the Locals platform where subscribers can see them.
But I like to release a few of them publicly just so you can see what's going on.
Now, if you think those videos are just for fun, because the theme of it is me trying to open ordinary consumer packaging, and it doesn't go well.
That's the basic theme.
There's a larger user interface point coming, and for some of you, you'll see that later.
All right. Here's a weird thing about the coronavirus.
It keeps making some things better.
Have you noticed that?
Have you noticed that coronavirus is making a lot of things worse?
I mean, that's where all the news is, of course.
But there are some things that are just definitely better.
Let me give you an example.
So I told you we have outdoor seating now.
So we have outdoor seating for the restaurants in my town.
Now I don't know if they took my suggestion or they just came up with it on their own.
I do know I made a suggestion through the biggest restaurant owner in town and he was going to contact the city.
So I don't know if it was because of me.
But anyway, my main street now is closed down.
For restaurant hours.
And the restaurants bring their tables into the street.
It becomes sort of like a street fair atmosphere.
Now the first thing that I noticed was, it was way better than eating indoors.
As long as the weather's okay.
It was way better. I know some of you are obsessing about this.
We'll talk about that later.
So, one of the things that's better is, what are the things you hate most about restaurants?
Number one, you hate getting a bad table, right?
You go to a restaurant, you make all this trouble, and then you see you at one of those tables where you're on the side of the table where all you're looking at is the person on the other side of the table and a wall.
All you're looking at is a wall and the other people, and you think to yourself, Well, did I really need to go out to eat tonight?
I'm just looking at a wall and people I could eat with anywhere.
But if you're eating outdoors, everybody has a good view because you're outdoors.
There's sort of a 360 view.
So eating outdoors is better.
But then this six-foot distance thing...
By the way, I'm not married.
I have the ring ahead of the marriage, so I was just wearing it.
But I'm not married yet, in case you wondered.
Soon. Soon.
I swear it's going to happen.
We got delayed several times because of the COVID thing, so we're sort of improvising as quickly as we can to figure out how to make it all work.
But I digress. I love having restaurant tables six feet apart.
Because the other thing you hate about a restaurant is that the people near you can hear your conversation.
You can hear theirs. So six feet apart, way better.
Outdoor seating, you know, plentiful outdoor seating on a street that's kind of a very attractive street in my case.
Much better. And then the third thing that I really like...
One of the things that I, my pet peeves about restaurants prior to COVID is I would hate it when my food would come or I had my bread or anything and the server would stand directly above the table or the manager would come over to talk to you or whatever and they would talk directly above your food.
Now maybe I'm the only person who's bothered by that but I don't like anybody talking Above my food.
I don't need to fill in the blanks, right?
So I'm usually like, if I'm listening to the server, the manager comes over, I'll be, uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, yeah, we're enjoying our food.
And I'll be moving my bread plate over, uh-huh, uh-huh, moving it out of the spray zone, uh-huh, very nice restaurant, thank you, yes, I've got all the salt I need, my fork, I got a fork, we don't need to be talking anymore.
And I'm slowly moving my food out of the spray zone.
And now, Server comes over with a mask, and I'm thinking, I like this for all the time.
I like this forever.
Can we do more of this?
Yesterday I was going to go out to do some errands, and I'd just been drinking some coffee, as I often do.
Now normally if I'm going to go out in public, I might encounter some people, and I would probably use mouthwash, Or brush my teeth again, just because I don't want to have coffee breath.
But I started to go do the mouthwash before I went out, and I thought to myself, no, I don't need this.
I'm wearing a mask.
So I just put on the mask, and like, well, same step.
No mouthwash if I'm going out.
Alright, but enough of that.
Two things we know for sure in 2020.
In fact, check me on this.
There are two things we know that we all know.
So this is something that the left knows, it's something that the right knows, and every independent knows.
Two things. See if you agree with both of them.
Number one, the only sensible way to make decisions is by looking at the data and listening to the experts.
That's one thing we know. Gotta look at the data, you gotta look at the experts.
The second thing we know, in 2020, all the data is shit and the experts are lying.
So we've actually, as a society, we've agreed on the following process.
It's the only thing we agree on.
You've got to look at the data and you've got to listen to the experts.
And the data is all wrong and the experts are lying.
We agree on both of those things.
And yet we've agreed that that's the system that we're all going to live under.
Unfortunately, I don't have a better system.
If I had a better system, I would be recommending it to you.
I don't think magic is a better system.
I don't think guessing is a better system.
But you certainly have to watch out for the data and the experts these days.
Now, the big news, of course, was the rally last night.
So you may have missed this little tidbit.
I'll just toss this out here.
Not important in any way.
Very small, trivial little fact.
Don't bother yourself with it.
Because there was lots of news last night about President Trump's use of words.
That's the important stuff.
Not this minor little story here.
A European spacecraft has found oxygen on Mars.
What?! What?!
Oxygen on Mars?
Now, of course, if this is like most other stories, as in 99% of stories, that sound a little bit like this, you know what I mean?
There's some stories that sound like other stories, but are different in all the details.
This one about oxygen on Mars, I'm going to put this in the category of things that later turn out to be bullshit.
That doesn't mean it is.
But have I mentioned that in 2020 all the data is shit and all the experts are lying?
So that's your context for the story.
Hey, we spotted oxygen on Mars because of some green glow or whatever.
To which I say to myself, or, or, there's no oxygen on Mars and you're just full of shit.
Just putting that out there as the other possibility.
That's 99% likely.
So I wouldn't count on oxygen on Mars.
All right. But that's the story.
There's a fascinating story about a Southern District of New York prosecutor who was looking into Rudy Giuliani and some Trump associates and He was either fired or quit or Trump fired him or Barr did or Trump told Barr to fire him or Barr said he'd fire him and Trump said okay or Trump didn't know and Barr fired him or Barr didn't know anything about it and Trump fired him or possibly he just quit and Barr thought he was fired but Trump said he was fired but possibly there's oxygen on Mars.
So I don't have any interest in this story whatsoever.
I kept trying to think, they keep talking about this story and sooner or later I'm going to get interested?
Nope. I've lost all interest in all lawyer stories.
How many times have we heard, there's a thing with a lawyer and this will be the end of Trump?
How many times have you heard that damn story?
All the details are always different, but there's always a lawyer and it's the end of Trump.
Sometimes there are two lawyers and this will be the end of Trump.
He's finished now because I've got a story and it's got a lawyer and that's the end of Trump.
So I'm sure this story about the prosecutor is the end of Trump.
Because he got fired allegedly for being good at his job, but that will easily be spun by Barr as being bad at his job.
So there's nothing here, but it's a story.
Here's an interesting, uh, thing.
Do you know that Raz Simone, the alleged warlord of the autonomous zone, um, Is neither a warlord nor a member of the Autonomous Zone.
If you were watching only right-oriented news sources, did you think that Raz Simone, so he's the guy who came in, he's got the weapons, and he was handing out weapons, and he seems to be sort of handling security, In the Autonomous Zone.
I was looking at his web, not his web, his Twitter feed, and he answered somebody early on, just maybe a week ago or so, he answered somebody, and he clarified, he said he's not autonomous, meaning he's not a member of the Autonomous Zone.
He's an American citizen.
So when asked to describe himself, well, he wasn't asked, he just volunteered, That he doesn't identify with the Autonomous Zone protesters.
He identifies with America.
Just think about it.
Just think about that.
He says explicitly and publicly, no, I identify with America.
I'm just helping out.
That's really different than what you've been told, isn't it?
Now, just because he said it doesn't mean it's true.
That's everything we know about the world.
But it sort of looks like maybe that is actually the case, and that he's a little bit more thoughtful and a little bit more complicated than the right-leaning reporting has indicated.
So I'm just going to put it out there, a little bug in your head.
I don't know what the deal is with him, and I'm not endorsing him.
I'm not telling you, oh, he's a good guy, and we should be comfortable with him.
He did hand out weapons to people from the trunk of his car.
We don't know what that is. And somebody did get a shot recently.
I'm not saying that's connected in any way.
It's probably not. But we got questions.
So there are more unanswered questions than there are answered.
But I'll just put that bug into your mind that he's a little more complicated, maybe in a good way, than you think.
So I'll just ask you to reserve judgment about the whole Raz situation until we know a lot more.
Now, I'm not endorsing it.
I'm not endorsing anything he's doing.
I'm just saying, there's something here we need to know more about, and I don't think you've been well served by your news sources.
That's all. Now, part of that story is that If you saw this, this was horrible.
So somebody got shot and ended up dying.
They bled out in the autonomous zone.
Don't know the details. But the medics from outside the zone showed up with their ambulances and they stopped at sort of the border.
But nobody was stopping them from coming in.
So we saw the video.
There seemed to be an open road.
There were no protesters.
And in fact, there was somebody from the Otanva Zone begging them to come all the way in.
And they were on the radios waiting for, I guess, police.
I think it was police approval to go into the zone.
Now, they decided not to until it was too late or they didn't.
I forget. I think they probably waited for the body to be taken out, actually.
And I don't know the details.
I might have that last part wrong.
But the point is that they intentionally waited while that guy was bleeding to death.
And they decided that it was too dangerous to go in, even though there was no immediate, obvious threat where they were on the border before they went in.
Now, there will be much discussion.
There will be much discussion about whether those medical professionals...
We're, let's say, not doing their duty by not accepting the extra danger, which, of course, I think everybody would agree there's some danger of going in that zone.
I don't know how much. But they did not accept that extra danger because they did not feel it was a secure place.
And they let them bleed out.
Now, how much of that was political, do you think?
Do you think that whoever was telling them not to go in, because it wasn't their decision really, I mean, I suppose they could have violated orders, but then they get fired.
Do you think that the people who told them not to go in were concerned only about their safety?
Or do you think that they used a guy bleeding out as a political pawn and they just let him die to make a point?
Because they did make a point.
I'm not sure it's the point they wanted to make, but they did make a point.
And the point is, this autonomous zone isn't functional.
It doesn't work. It can't keep you alive.
And so, I'm seeing in the comments that somebody's calling them cowards.
I don't think that's what was going on.
My guess is that the people in the ambulances were...
In a tough situation.
But I don't think what stopped them was fear.
I don't. I guess I'm biased, because I feel like people who do that job...
I mean, if you can be an emergency medical person, I just don't know if physical fear is a big part of your life.
Because you must have overcome that somehow, even to just do your job.
So I don't know that they were afraid.
I do know they had orders not to go in, and they decided to follow the orders.
Now, is that wrong?
I don't know. But you'd have to ask yourself, did the medics help or hurt the situation in the long run?
Because by not going in, they didn't make the point that you've got to wind this thing down.
They did it by letting somebody die, perhaps.
I don't know. They might have saved lives.
They may have saved future lives by letting a few die.
Because maybe that winds it down faster.
Who knows? Hard to score that one.
But it's tragic either way.
Just about two years ago this summer, I sat in the President's Oval Office.
And this is the one thing I'll tell you just because it makes the president look smart, so I don't think he would mind if I told you this one little tidbit from the conversation.
And that was that he predicted two years ago, the president did, to me personally, that Biden would be the nominee.
Pretty good, right?
So two years before it happened, President Trump's instincts, and lots of other people picked Biden as well, so it wasn't that surprising, but But he picked Biden two years ago, and he was right.
So you have to give him that bit of insight and instinct.
I can personally vouch for his confident prediction that it would be Biden, and he was right.
Now I sat there, and I said that it would be Kamala Harris.
Now think about two years ago, where was Kamala Harris?
She was not even in the primaries yet.
So that was a pretty bold call that I picked one politician out of a big swarm, and she's made it, apparently, all the way to the vice presidential finals.
But what's interesting is that when she dropped out of the race to be the top spot, I continued with my prediction and said that she would reemerge, retrained.
This is the important part.
I said that she would be retrained by the top-level professionals in the country, you know, the people who are really, really good at it, and that she would emerge almost like a different candidate, stronger, more confident, more capable of communicating, saying the right things, never the wrong things, that sort of thing.
And that has happened.
That's happened. If you've watched her for the last month, She's a completely different candidate.
She's changed her look.
She has fixed her body language.
Because she used to talk like jumpy.
Her shoulders would move when she's talking.
And it just looked unconfident.
She stopped it.
After a lifetime of that activity, in the last month, she stopped her entire body language thing.
Now you can do that if you practice.
But I guarantee there was some external source who said, look, you've got to get your body under control and send in the wrong signal.
And she has. The other thing was her unconfident laugh.
She would laugh at her own jokes.
And if you saw her laughing and answering about in the debate, she said that it was just a debate.
Then she laughed. It was more of a confident laugh.
In other words, she was laughing not at her own joke unconfidently, She was laughing at the person who asked the joke for it being so silly.
That's a whole different laugh, and it worked.
Here's the next thing she did.
So yesterday she tweeted this.
Kamala Harris tweets, I was raised to know that being black means that you are capable of doing anything.
That if we are committed, if we are deep in faith, we can do anything.
But it requires resilience and most of all, love of self.
And it's a wonderful thing.
Now, that is almost a pure Republican tweet, isn't it?
The Republican point of view is the only thing stopping you is yourself.
We took care of making the laws fair, as fair as we can.
It needs lots of tweaking, but at least on paper they're fair.
So the thing that's holding you back is your own motivation, your own effort, your own life choices.
It's very Republican.
And so now, Kamala Harris, just out of nowhere, she wasn't prompted to say it, has volunteered the most Republican statement you've ever heard.
Now, she can still, you know, say that there's a victim thing going on as well, so she doesn't have to abandon that.
But notice she's triangulating.
That's the Clinton strategy.
Triangulation. In other words, she's starting to move toward the center where everybody can agree.
I'm going to talk about this.
Actually, I'll talk about it now.
Let's go to the whiteboard.
I've said this before, but I figured a better way to present it, so I think that's worth doing.
Forget about the shadows here.
So, the GOP and the Democrats have different views of what equality should or is.
And this is a generalization.
It doesn't apply to any one person, right?
So just in general, the Republicans think that if you have equality of rights and equality of opportunity, well, you're done.
The rest is up to you, right?
As long as we made the laws equal on paper, it's up to you working out.
In general, right?
Again, these are gross generalizations.
The Democrats are a little more focused on outcomes, which is, hey, Yeah, I see on paper it looks good, but our outcomes are different, so that's something that must be fixed.
We've got to figure out how to get the outcomes better, whatever that takes.
And these are hard to resolve, and my suggestion is that the useful middle ground, the triangulation place, the place that a national candidate could find agreement on both the left and the right, is equality of strategies.
What do I mean by that?
Here's what I mean. As a white person in America, do I have enough strategies for success?
The answer is yes. Yes.
As a white person in America, I have plenty of strategies for success.
Stay out of jail. Don't do drugs.
Go to a good school.
That's it. Because if I do those things and I'm a white person in America, sooner or later I can get a job and I can make something work out.
But suppose I'm black in America.
Do I have the same strategies or different strategies?
As long as I have plentiful strategies, For success, does it matter if they're exactly the same as someone else's strategies?
Not so much. Not so much.
For example, if I said, I'm going to give you $100, and I'm going to reach into my right pocket and give it to you, do you care if I say I would do my right pocket or my left pocket?
Doesn't matter. You know, you just, you got your $100, and you didn't do any extra work.
Either way, they're all equal.
So I would say that if one group has a good basket of strategies, all of them are perfectly acceptable, but they're different from somebody else's basket of strategies, I would say that you have equality of strategy so long as both baskets are full of good strategies that don't have any limitations compared to the other basket.
So if you're a black person in America, can you?
Do you have the option?
It might be harder because of Let's say if you're interceding, you have different pressures.
But you still can.
Not do drugs. Pay attention in school.
Your school is worse, perhaps.
Go to college. Get a college scholarship.
So if you're black, you have an extra strategy because you're more likely to be able to get a college scholarship.
If you get a college degree, or it could be anything, it could be a trade, learning a trade, it doesn't have to be college.
Once you're ready for the workforce, do you have a strategy for getting a job in our big old racist, discriminating world?
And the answer is yes.
Yes, unlike the white person's strategy, which is, oh, I'll just go get a job.
There's nothing really stopping me.
Black people might have some racism.
Depending on the situation, there could be some racism that they have to overcome.
But they also have a strategy that white people don't have, which is being black.
You can go into any Fortune 500 company, and I really mean it, any, pretty much 100% of every Fortune 500 company, take your college degree and say, I'd like to get a job, and they will hire you practically before you get the sentence out of your mouth.
Because they have great pressure to improve diversity.
So if you go in there with some skills they can use, it's yes.
It's yes. And they also need to make sure that they've got enough diversity in senior management.
So are they going to overlook you if you're black?
Or are they going to give you a really good look?
Because they really need you to succeed.
And the answer is they're going to give you a really hard look And maybe pick you above other people, even if they don't say that, because it helps senior management to promote black employees, because it makes them look good.
Hey, look at me. I got some diversity here.
So, I believe that children especially need to be taught that Although strategies might be different, although racism is pervasive and universal, and no matter what you do about it, you can't get rid of all of it.
It's just sort of baked into our human experience.
You can try as hard as you can, but if you're talking about what is equal, what is fair, what is a standard by which we should measure how well we're doing as a society, I would argue that if everybody has strategies for success, That's about as fair as you can get.
There might be an idealized level of fairness that you'd like to accomplish that might be just impossible.
But the best you can get in the real world is you've all got a path.
They're just different paths.
So, if Kamala Harris were to take an approach like this and say, look, racism exists, everybody agrees, we'll do what we can, we'll tweak these systems, we'll try to You know, get more control over the judicial system in particular.
But the real thing is strategy.
Let's get a strategy for success.
Let's fix the schools, whatever.
By the way, if I had to pick one source of racism...
Like, if you look at all the things you would need to fix...
To reduce, let's say, racial outcomes.
You don't even have to say racism.
You could say racial outcomes so that black students can do better.
How do you improve that?
Every poor student can do better.
How do you improve that? If you could take it down to one problem, what would it be?
Let's say one thing you could fix, what would it be?
Here's my vote.
The teachers' unions.
I'm not an expert in this field.
But from what I can see, the existence of the teachers' unions makes racism possible and promotes it.
Because you can't fix the schools unless you have some choice and some competition.
My understanding is that Black Lives Matter and Republicans agree on the following point.
Wouldn't it be nice to have better schools for black people?
This is where Republicans and Black Lives Matter are on the same page.
Wouldn't it be nice to have better schools for black people?
And for everybody, of course.
The Republicans would just say everybody.
But don't you think Republicans want better schools for black kids?
Yeah. Yeah, they do.
How do you get there with teachers' unions in place?
You can't. You can't.
There is no path.
While teachers' unions exist in their current form, there's no path.
You can't get to an improved school because you can't get competition.
You can't fire bad teachers.
You don't have school choice.
You're not going to be able to use the, let's say, religious school or private school or any other school, even if you could afford it.
You just can't use them. They don't exist.
So there's an obvious strategy for making things better, which is to Break the teachers' union.
Of course, that has its problems.
All right. We'll talk about the speech here in a minute.
There's a pundit on CNN, Harry Enten, who believes that...
The rumored belief that there are shy Trump supporters and that the polls are not picking them up.
So Harry Enten writes this opinion piece on CNN saying that that can't be the case.
It can't be true that Republicans are lying to pollsters because the way they're polled is with robocalls, so there's not a human being.
And Harry Enten I don't want to insult the guy, but I don't know how to talk about this without insulting his intelligence.
He thinks that because you gave your political opinion to a robocall, that you're talking to a machine so you wouldn't have any problems with your privacy.
Harry, I would be really embarrassed to put that opinion in public because...
Because that robocall knows your phone number and it knows what answers you gave by pushing the keypad or however you did it.
And that's all in a database.
You don't think a human has access to the database?
How could you be so unaware of the world to think that because a computer is collecting the information that humans don't have access to it?
So I can't think of a Republican who would trust a robot with their personal information.
A robot comes to your door and says, Hey, I'm a robot.
Can you tell me your medical information?
You go, Are you kidding? That's private.
I'm not going to tell you my medical information.
And the robot at your door says, Oh, no, no.
I'm not even a person.
I'm a machine. You can tell me.
And then the Republican says, Really?
If I tell you...
That, you know, I still have privacy because you're a machine?
And the robot says, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't lie to you.
And then the Republican goes into his gun safe, takes out the biggest weapon he can, and he blows the head off the robot because it's obviously an evil robot, and I think it would be a justified killing.
So Biden is 11 points ahead on these robot calls.
Maybe. Maybe.
You know, I don't think you can rule out that Biden is actually ahead and might actually win the election.
Could happen. So here's the biggest story of the day that will be treated as the smallest story of the day.
But it might grow over time.
As Joel Pollack pointed out, both by tweet and on Breitbart, where he wrote about it, What we saw last night was, you noticed that the rally crowd was not that big.
And, of course, the campaign, the Trump campaign, tried to say, you know, maybe it was because protesters tried to keep people out, but it wasn't that.
The protesters did do a little interfering, but it didn't have anything to do with the final count.
So what was it that did it?
Well, AOC and some of the Democrats are Crowing, as they say, crowing, that they're quite happy that they believe there was a TikTok prank.
In other words, users of TikTok got together and they organized this online campaign to RSVP to the rally, but not planning to actually go.
So they were just going to say they were going, and then, you know, the campaign was saying, we sold a million tickets or a million RSVPs, but that was all fake.
That was a TikTok prank that started small and grew into a big thing.
So AOC was laughing and mocking the Republicans and the Trump campaign last night by tweet, Ha ha ha, you fools.
The clever, clever anti-Trump users, the citizens, the young citizens, she called them the Zoomers, you know, the young people on TikTok, They organized this campaign and they tricked you and they made your rally a failure.
Is that the story?
Is there anything, maybe a detail that could be added to that story that would make it a little bit different?
Is there anything maybe missing from her tweet?
Well, TikTok is a Chinese company.
Who controls the algorithm in TikTok?
Well, TikTok. TikTok gets to decide what their algorithm is.
But who controls TikTok?
Chinese government.
Because they control any Chinese company that they have an interest in.
If they didn't care, they wouldn't control them.
But since TikTok is a gigantic social media company with a gigantic influence potential, that would be a case where you could know with certainty that the Chinese government has some control over the TikTok algorithm.
Now let me ask you this.
If you're familiar with TikTok, you know it's mostly people doing funny little singing and dancing videos.
You know that that's 99%.
And you know that the age...
It's sort of the 12-year-old.
It's sort of the core age.
A little bit older, but 12 is probably the real point.
Now, can you remember in your memory of your entire life, do you remember the other time that 12-year-olds were really interested in politics to the extent that they would care about one rally in Tulsa?
And that they would care so much about politics, these 12-year-old Americans.
Because, you know, your 12-year-old American girls, I think it's mostly girls, 12-year-old American girls, what they really care about is politics.
And the issue they care about the most is the number of people who attended a Trump rally in Tulsa.
Because that's the sort of thing they care about when they're 12.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that the...
That the size of this viral campaign was driven entirely by organic interest of 12 year old girls in politics.
Is that what you think?
Do you believe that this happened organically?
It's possible.
But it would be the first time ever that 12 year old girls got deeply involved in politics.
I would say the odds that this happened organically are pretty close to zero.
Which means that right in front of us, and by the way, since the rally crowd size has been front page news, so there's nobody who could argue that this story of how many people attended the rally doesn't have an effect on our political system.
You couldn't claim that, right?
Nobody reasonable could say, well, that didn't have an influence on the campaign.
It was such a small thing.
Well, it is a small thing compared to all the other things, but it is nonetheless true that we watched right in front of ourselves the Chinese government changing the news cycle of how we report on the biggest political decision of our lifetimes, perhaps. So here's the thing.
If TikTok is still legal in the United States next week, your government is fucking worthless.
So I don't know that TikTok will be banned in the United States, but if it's still alive in a week, the government of the United States is just not doing the job.
I mean...
This was such an obvious foreign interference.
And I'll even go further.
Suppose you can imagine that since you can't prove the Chinese government did anything, you know, there's no smoking gun because we don't have access to the algorithm.
Even if you couldn't prove it, what's the difference?
What's the difference? You still have to shut it down because China could have done that.
Whether or not they actually did it in this case is completely irrelevant to the question of shutting them down.
This case shows unambiguously that they could have done it.
All they had to do is boost the algorithm so that more people saw the posts.
That's it. How many people do you think would organically see a political post on TikTok?
Do you think that's the kind of post that goes viral?
Hey, I'm going to say something about politics on TikTok.
That'll go viral? Well, some of them are, but that feels like a new phenomenon.
Like, maybe there's somebody behind the curtain who's saying, well, there's not much political out here, but we're going to make these big.
So, I don't know.
There's no way to shade this at this point.
TikTok has to be closed down.
It has to be closed down.
Because what we saw last night was worse than Russia collusion was even alleged.
Way worse. You saw the Facebook ads that the Russians did, like complete amateur hour, had no effect on anything, I can guarantee it.
But this did.
This actually changed the news cycle in real time.
You watched it. You watched it.
There's nothing else to ask.
There's no further investigation needs to be done.
You know that they could have done it, so even if they didn't, it's too big of a risk.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if TikTok gets shut down by the end of the week, next week.
I wouldn't be surprised if it gets shut down on Monday.
And I will tell you that if we go all the way into the election and TikTok is still legal in the United States, Trump doesn't deserve to get elected.
So let me say it as clearly as possible.
If TikTok doesn't get shut down before election day, I don't care if Trump wins or not.
I mean, he's not doing the basic job of the president if he lets that continue to be a A product that is sold in the United States or used in the United States.
Would you agree, by the way?
Wouldn't you say that's just so basic to the job that if he can't get that done, I'd look at somebody else?
You've got to start looking at the alternatives if the guy who's in the position doesn't do something that basic.
All right. Let's talk about how he did on the speech itself.
I know that's what you care about.
My first take, and I tweeted about it, but then I deleted my tweet, is that it looked like a disaster.
So the first, I don't know, 15 minutes of it or so, I was just thinking, this is the worst rally.
It looks like he's trying not to win.
And that was my first impression.
And here are some of the things that I saw for that.
He said stuff like, these are all red meat he was feeding CNN. So my specific complaint...
It seemed like the entire speech was just to give CNN material to criticize him about.
Stuff that just didn't need to be said.
It just wasn't helping him, but it could hurt him.
That was my first impression.
I'll tell you how that changed.
So he talked about the flu being the Chinese flu.
I think he said the Kung Flu flu.
So you know that's going to be called racist.
He used the word ombre, you know, what if some bad ombre comes, and even signaled to us that he knows he's not supposed to use that word, and then he used it after he signaled he's not supposed to.
He, of course, supported statues, which people will interpret as racist, even if it isn't.
He used the word thugs that he knows people will interpret as racist, even though it isn't.
He talked about his supporters would fight better if it came to a civil war.
The Republicans would win because they're better fighters, basically.
And the Second Amendment is important because of the protesters, which makes CNN think he's talking about shooting people.
So, and then of course he had, I don't think he mentioned Juneteenth.
He didn't mention any unifying words.
The entire, all of the visuals were Trump supporters packed tightly together and not wearing masks and frankly looking like idiots.
Let me say that as clearly as possible.
The visual of it, in the middle of a pandemic, seeing crowds and crowds and crowds and picture after picture, Trump supporters standing shoulder to shoulder without masks, it does make them look like idiots.
So it's just a terrible look.
I kind of expected that the President would not be wearing a mask, but that the participants would be strongly encouraged to wear them.
Some of them had them, but not many.
So I would say that the...
I'm not sure how that played with Republicans.
My guess is that Republicans generally liked his speech.
Probably more liked it than not.
But even Trump himself referred to the first part of his speech as not up to the standard he wanted it to.
He actually criticized the quality of his own speech while he was giving it, and he was accurate, which made me laugh.
So that's the part we like about him.
There's some You know, that lack of a filter is very appealing, even though it has all kinds of problems associated with it.
It's just appealing to some types of people, I would include myself.
But here's what he did right.
Oh, another thing he said, jokingly or not, He said that all the testing makes it look like there's more infections, and that's bad for Trump.
So he said he told his team to slow down the testing because it makes them look bad.
Now, CNN chose to interpret that as literal, like he actually meant that.
To his credit, Chris Silliza, who was on CNN in one of those multi-person panel shots, when they went to him, he said, And he said it explicitly.
Well, I don't think he was completely serious about that.
In other words, at least Chris Silliza recognized that when the president says things like this, you shouldn't always take them as literal, but the other panelists chose to because then that makes it a story.
But just knowing that Chris Silliza was like, I don't know that that's serious, is helpful.
Because you know that even CNN has got to have a little bit of question whether he was joking.
And by the way, he was joking.
And then he also said that he talked to the Republicans on the plane coming over, some of the other politicians, and they were talking about how it might be better to let the cities burn because it would look good for Trump.
And I thought to myself, oh God, did he really say that?
Did he say the Republicans are talking about letting the cities burn because it would be good politically?
Did he really say that?
But people also realize, because he also said, that if the cities allowed him to, he could stop the problems in an hour.
He'd have to send in the military, but he'd stop in an hour.
So he's very clear that the reason that he's holding off is because the Democrat mayors are not letting him in.
If they asked, he would come in and solve their problem.
So here's my overall take.
When I first heard the first few things that I knew would be on CNN, I wrote them down and checked.
And as soon as it was done, yes, every point that you pulled out, that you knew when he said it.
It was like, ugh, there is the CNN headline.
Ugh, there is another one.
And sure enough, every one of them was there.
But it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
I looked at the headlines last night and they didn't use the word racist.
What's up with that?
He fed them intentionally race-baiting ideas.
The ombre one was the one that told you what he was thinking.
Because that one was a little too on the nose.
He actually said, I like to use the word ombre.
He made some reference to the fact that it would be trouble.
And then he used it. So here, if you look at all the things he said that normally other people would put in the context of racism, I didn't see it as strongly as I thought CNN was going to play it.
Because if you look at all these things, they really more easily fall into being offensive than free speech.
So I think the president has carved out a strong position Which he refuses to give an inch on, which is free speech, which is a gigantic issue for his base.
And watching him not bow even a little bit to political pressure about how to speak, I kind of liked.
I kind of liked it.
Even though I was like, oh, don't say that, don't say that.
At the same time, the other part of my brain was saying, I like the fact that he's...
He's protecting the space, meaning that he's absolutely adamant about the right to offend people about anything.
He wants the right to be offensive, and he's fighting for it.
And that right accrues to his base, I think, by association, in the sense that if he doesn't get canceled, that does set some kind of a standard.
Now, there were no unifying words.
A lot of people on both sides say, well, that was kind of a missed opportunity.
But on the other hand, on the other hand, as we watch the Democrats self-immolate, in other words, the autonomous zone is all bad news for Democrats, I would think.
Any ongoing trouble, it seems like it's accruing to Democrats the, you know, the The Democrats in the middle seem to be losing ground to the left.
This is the weirdest election because the best campaign strategy for both Biden and Trump is to not campaign.
Isn't that weird? Biden is definitely advantaged by not campaigning.
But so is Trump.
I think Trump just has to wait and just let the news play the news.
A lot of people have criticized him for not being more vocal about the protesters, the destruction, etc.
If he had been more vocal, it would have been called racist.
He did say all the right things about George Floyd, etc.
And he did do an executive order on police processes.
So he was paying attention, he was acting, he was saying the right things.
But once he's done the basics...
Maybe just not talking is his best campaign strategy.
I mean, that would be surprising if it were.
I'm not recommending it.
But overall, I would say that the President gave a speech much like his last...
much like his other speeches.
I don't think it will make a dent.
It will not lose him any votes.
It will not gain him any votes.
But... Here might be the one thing that we took away from it that might be the one thing that was the most persuasive.
Are you ready for it?
Here's the one most persuasive thing that came out of it.
What Trump did in front of the entire world, I don't know, he was there for an hour or whatever it was, whatever the time was, he did a one-hour presentation That there isn't one person in the entire world who believes Biden could have done that.
Nobody. There's no Democrat and there's no Republican who believes Biden could have simply even performed the way Trump did.
Forget about what he said, just the performance.
Trump was clearly mentally all there.
He was on top of his game.
He even made fun of his slow start.
I think he's a little out of practice.
Got a little out of practice with the rallies and stuff because of the time off.
I think that will fix.
I think he'll be better every time he does it.
The slaughter meter is probably about 50-50 right now.
So it's below 100%.
But it's also going to be moving all over the place between now and election.
He was very funny.
I think he had his funniest jokes when he talked about the ramp.
And he had an excellent presentation on the water glass and using his one hand and the saluting and stuff.
So in terms of playing to his base, I think it was very successful.
In terms of the left, I don't know, the protests seemed to fizzle out.
The protests seemed to fizzle out.
Yeah, he was pretty funny.
I had a good laugh over some of his stuff.
And I was watching the fact-checker Dale, is his name, the fact-checker.
So Trump claimed that the last 10 feet of the ramp, he sort of, you know, ran down, and that if they showed the last part of the ramp, they would see that there's nothing wrong with Trump, that it was obviously the ramp, because the last part he ran.
Now, of course, he didn't.
That just didn't happen.
If you look at the video, no.
There was no running down the ramp.
Did not happen.
But immediately after he was off the ramp, he did show a little spring in his step.
And I remember seeing that even before he mentioned it.
And I thought, oh, that little spring in his step is I think he's signaling to anybody watching, there's nothing wrong with me.
That it's the ramp. And when I watched it, that's exactly what I thought.
He did a little skip at the end when he got off, clearly showing that he had full control of his body and his legs.
It was just the ramp.
So when Dale fact checks it and says, no, the last 10 feet of that ramp, he is not running.
And he said he was running.
And that's just not true.
But if you watch the video, you're going to see him get to the end of the ramp and then do a little skip thing.
And then you can say, oh, okay, well, he did exaggerate the end of the ramp thing, but it's also obvious that the dude's lied because he's fine.
And then he, obviously, there's nothing wrong with his hand drinking water.
I was very curious what the two hands on the water glass was because we've seen him do it before.
He holds it with two hands.
And his explanation was he's trying to keep a drip from his tie, because it looks bad if you get like a little drip on your tie, on a silk tie, it's really going to show.
And I thought, that is so weird.
I think it's true.
I think it was so weird that it would be hard not to believe that, that he used the second hand to keep a drip off his tie.
I don't know that you would make that up.
That would be the weirdest thing in the world to make up.
So as soon as I heard it, I thought, well, that is just so weird.
