Episode 1108 Scott Adams: Portland Badness, the Total Collapse of Biden's Chances, Murdered Trump Supporter
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Sport-hunting in police-free Portland
Alice Johnson attacked by protesters after RNC
Ted Wheeler's letter rejecting National Guard assistance
Bill to decriminalize marijuana at the Federal level
Riots, violence, death because fake news stokes the fire
Gullible people in a world where all the news is fake news
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Yeah, I know it's Sunday and most of you should be in church, but there could be enough of you here to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
And enjoy it you will.
It's the only thing that's almost as good as church.
I was going to say better, but I don't want to start a fight on a Sunday.
So I'll say almost as good.
And all you need to enjoy the simultaneous hip?
Well, you don't need much.
That's the beauty of it.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better except the protests in Portland.
Apparently nothing helps those.
It's called The Simultaneous Hip and It Happens Now.
Go. Good stuff.
Well, I just saw a tweet from Jake Novak.
Who is saying it's 9.35am on Sunday and real clear politics still hasn't published the results of the blockbuster new DI poll.
I don't know what the DI poll is.
Showing Trump in the lead that came out at 10pm last night.
So there is some suggestion that the polls have turned just dramatically for Trump.
Now if they hadn't Turned dramatically for Trump recently.
I would be quite surprised.
But apparently there's some hesitation to even print the polls.
The polls are so big, are so bad, that they won't even print them.
So that's pretty bad.
And funny at the same time.
Now, there was a tragic shooting last night in Portland.
And I would like to do something that you rarely see.
And this will be so rare that some of you will remember when you saw it for the rest of your life.
You know, sometimes when there's some big event, you'll be like, I always don't remember what I was doing when that happened.
And here's the rare and special thing I'm going to do.
I'm going to be consistent in public.
I know. I know.
It's crazy. You don't think I can do it.
Watch this.
Watch this consistency.
Yesterday I said that people who resist arrest, they're the problem.
And that the media has convinced us it's a police problem.
Police could do better.
Everybody could do better at anything they're doing.
So that's a general statement.
But it's mostly a resisting arrest problem, if you look at it that way.
And so I was showing not too much sympathy for the people resisting arrest because they were clearly inviting the problems they got.
If you invite a problem, And then the problem comes in because you invited the problem and you knew you were inviting the problem and the problem was exactly the problem you knew you were inviting and now you have a problem.
I don't have any sympathy for you.
None. I don't have a bit of sympathy for you.
Last night, apparently, there was somebody who knew he was going into a kill zone dressed like somebody that is trying to get killed.
Do I have sympathy for the Trump, allegedly, we don't know the story yet, but allegedly there's some Blue Lives Matter or Trump supporter who went right into the middle of a violent crowd that was armed and looking to kill people like him.
People like him. Here's my consistency.
I'm not going to tell you that I don't care about those resisting arrest people, regardless of color.
It has nothing to do with ethnicity.
White person, black person, it doesn't matter.
If they're resisting arrest, I just don't have sympathy for them.
Don't ask me to. If somebody goes consciously and willingly into the most dangerous place they could possibly go and a bad thing happens to them, don't ask me for sympathy.
Don't ask me for any sympathy.
Do you think I'm going to give empathy to this guy?
Because he was a Trump supporter or because he was anti-whatever he was, anti-protesters, I don't know.
Whatever he was. I just can't go there.
I just can't give you any sympathy for somebody who brings, knowingly brings a problem on themselves.
I've got enough problems of my own.
I don't have too many problems, actually.
That's sort of a lie.
I don't have a lot of big problems.
But there are certainly enough problems that people who are good people, who are not trying to get in any trouble, who just need a little extra boost somehow, I'm happy to help those people.
Those people deserve my empathy.
I'd rather use empathy than sympathy in this case.
And I'll see what I can do.
See how I can help.
But if you're bringing trouble on yourself, don't ask me to be unhappy about it.
Ever. So that's what it looks like to be consistent in public.
You may never see it again.
So remember where you were.
You were watching my periscope when I happened.
So we don't know a lot about this person who was shot, we think, just for being a Trump supporter or a Blue Lives Matter supporter, which means to the protesters they would have defined that.
As a white supremacist, there's no evidence that he was or wasn't.
There's just no evidence on that.
So we're still in the fog of war on that.
Governor Kate Brown...
Oh, so here's what else happened.
So... Apparently there were 150 people with gas masks and helmets.
I think those were the protesters, not the counter-protesters.
Remember I was saying that, why is it that we don't hear about the number of protesters?
Hasn't that been odd to you?
Why don't we ever hear the number of them?
Sometimes they say, well, it's in the small, it's, you know, just in a few blocks.
And they talk about the real estate.
But they don't really talk about the number of them.
And you don't hear it on the media from the left.
You don't hear it on the media from the right.
And you don't even hear it from all the independents, you know, like Andy Ngo, etc., who are showing up.
Now, maybe I'm missing it.
That's possible. I mean, maybe it's being reported and just by coincidence, everywhere I look, I don't see it.
But you don't know, do you?
In the comments, tell me if you know how many people show up for any of these protests.
I have no idea. Let me tell you why this is so important.
Let's say it's 150 people who were clearly identified as protesters.
Is that the right number?
I don't know. But if there's 150, what does that tell you about the solution?
It tells you the solution is really easy.
Because 150 people is not many people for a protest.
You know, you could certainly round up enough law enforcement so you outnumbered them if you wanted to.
Could you not find 150 law enforcement people?
But here's the more dangerous thought.
Not a recommendation.
I'm not recommending this.
But it's easy to imagine where things are going to go on their own.
Whether I recommended it or discouraged it, it wouldn't matter.
It's going to happen on its own.
And that is, if it's only 150 protesters and they're actually destroying the entire city, you know, not the whole city at once, but they're sort of chewing away and breaking a new storefront every night and it's never going to stop.
At some point, the people who are not happy with this will organize and they will say, all right, how many of us does it take to get rid of them?
There are only 150 of them and they're not that big.
Could the counter-protesters, every single night of the year, come up with more than 150 counter-protesters to shut them down?
Again, I'm not recommending this.
I'm just saying this is a likely outcome.
So if the reporting told us the number of people, we would also know what the solution looked like.
Or we would be able to predict what would happen You know, you wouldn't call it a solution if the counter-protesters come there to get into a fight.
That would just be a different problem.
But you can kind of predict where it's going if you knew how many there were.
And also if you knew if that number was growing or shrinking recently.
You know, what's it look like the last ten nights of protests?
Exactly the same number?
A little bigger? Bigger on weekends?
What's it look like? No reporting on that, of course.
Um... But I guess there were a bunch of pro-police people that might have been pro-Trump at the same time who decided that going into the middle of this craziness was a good idea.
Now, if you didn't see the videos...
Of the Trump supporters in big trucks with their flags, not all of them went through the middle of the protests, but some of them did.
I think most of the protesters decided to drive around Portland, but some decided to go right through the middle looking for trouble.
And you see these Trump supporters sitting in the back of trucks with, at least in one case, I don't know how many others, With a paintball gun.
And you'd see the protesters throw an egg or something.
And then you'd see the Trump guy in the truck who's literally just sport hunting with a paintball gun.
He's sport hunting. You just look at him and it's obvious he came there for the sport.
and he's got his paint gun, and he's just like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
Nobody got hurt, I don't think.
You know, probably stung.
Got some paint on him.
I don't think anybody got hurt.
I hope not. But it's obvious, at least that small group of the protesters that didn't represent all the counter-protesters, but that small group quite obviously came there for the fight club.
They came there for the entertainment.
And do I feel sorry for anybody they shot with a paint gun?
Nope. Don't.
Everybody chose to be there.
Under exactly the circumstances that they experienced.
They were all adult conscious choices.
Mostly adult, I guess. So, that was predictable, that it would turn into a fight club, and it did.
The real question is, now do the counter-protesters enjoy it enough that they go back?
And I gotta tell you, for those of you who are watching this who are either women I'm going to make a gross generality.
Are you ready for this?
You can tell me if this is sexist or not.
And I will accept your condemnation if you say, Scott, that's a little bit sexist.
I will accept that classification.
But here's what I'm going to say. Men and women don't quite think the same.
And women don't really have any idea how dark men can be.
You don't know.
Because men are largely killers who have been socialized.
You know, we're basically killers.
We're killers of animals in order to hunt and eat.
We're killers of the other tribe, the other country.
We're basically killers Who sometimes do some procreating and protecting the people involved in procreation.
But we're kind of murderers at our base.
Now, are gross generalizations accurate?
No! No!
That's why they're gross generalizations.
I don't mean to suggest that each of the men watching this are murderers or even trying to suppress it.
I'm just saying that compared to women, We're a little bit more willing to pull a trigger.
It's sort of baked into a lot of our DNA. Not everybody.
Everybody's different. And I even completely accept that there are more categories than men and women.
I know most of you don't.
But I'm completely open with people being whatever they want to be.
If it doesn't bother me.
So here's the thing.
When I watched those Trump supporters paintballing the crowd, and then also when I watched the crowd getting all excited about destroying stuff and burning things, I said to myself, if you're a woman and you're watching this, this all looks bad.
Like it's nothing but bad from bottom to top.
There are no good people there.
It's just bad, bad, bad.
Again, gross generalization.
Plenty of women would disagree with this, and I understand.
But if you're a man, and I probably shouldn't even admit this, because this is not something anybody could be proud of.
It's just sort of a truth.
A lot of men could watch those videos of the paintballing and the egg throwing and the fires and say to themselves, I wouldn't mind having a little bit of that.
Now, not most men.
You know, it's going to be...
Less than half.
But I'll bet more than half said to themselves, I can see why that would be fun.
I wouldn't personally do it.
I'm not going to put myself in that amount of danger for no particular benefit that I can see.
But I can see that that guy sitting on the back of the pickup truck who was just shooting paintball at people he didn't like with complete impunity.
There was no law there.
No law. It was a police-free zone in which anybody can go.
There's a scheduled event that's basically Fight Club.
People go there to fight.
And I think it attracts people who find this recreational.
And I don't mean that as hyperbole.
I mean, literally, all of the people there seem to be there recreationally.
I'm not for that or against it.
it, I'm simply noting it.
So if you assume that it was fun, and again, I realize how disgusting that word is in this context, especially when somebody got killed, but it did look like these people are there for fun, what would stop it?
Why wouldn't you have as many counter-protesters tomorrow?
Why wouldn't you have more Trump supporters there tomorrow than last night?
Well, you'd say, well, one of them got killed.
That's a reason not to go.
I don't think you understand.
If you think that's going to keep people from doing this, then you don't quite understand men.
That actually made it a little bit more attractive.
Not to everybody.
Everybody's different, you know, but...
But there are a lot of men who looked at that and said, yeah, I think I'd like to get a little bit more of that.
So who knows where that's going?
Of course, the guy who got killed is already being branded as a white supremacist.
Who knows what he is?
I'm not going to say he is or is not any particular thing.
I'm just going to say I don't know, but I don't think there's evidence of that.
You know the story about Rand Paul getting jostled by the protesters when he left the RNC, but apparently Alice Johnson got The same treatment.
Alice Johnson. African-American woman, pardoned by the president, and even she was attacked by the Black Lives Matter protesters.
Think about that. And apparently she was quite scared about that.
There's another part of that story that I need verification from, but there's a more alarming part of the story, not in terms of danger, But I'm going to wait for a confirmation before I mention that in public.
All right. Could President Trump and the Trump campaign be any luckier?
And again, lucky is a hard word to use in this context because people are getting killed.
But luckier in the sense of if you were running for election and the biggest complaint against you...
Let's say two of the biggest complaints against you are...
Number one, you're some kind of an authoritarian dictator.
So that's a big worry about Trump.
Number two, that he may not be competent just managing any kind of situation.
So those are two of, you know, they're not the only complaints about Trump, but those are two of the biggest ones, I would think.
And among those two big complaints, Ted Wheeler...
And also the governor whose name is, the governor whose name is, you know, whatever her name is.
By the way, Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland, he wrote a letter, didn't have to put it in a letter.
This is where the Democrats are just completely playing into Trump's hands.
He didn't have to put it in a letter, but now he has formally and publicly denounced Trump's offer to send in the National Guard, and they say they got it under control.
What could be more perfect for Trump?
Because every day that he doesn't overrule the local mayor, think about it.
Trump is the president of the United States.
He's the commander-in-chief of the most awesome military force in the entire universe.
That's how much power Trump has.
Ted Wheeler, Can't even walk outside in his own street without getting accosted by his own people or protesters he's allowed in his town.
Ted Wheeler's own apartment is under attack by the protesters.
Ted Wheeler stops the president from bringing in any kind of force with a letter.
That's it. A letter.
This little mayor, who has no power over his own citizens or his own city, stopped this giant dictator authoritarian with the most massive military on earth, stopped him cold with a letter.
He wrote a letter. That's it.
And did Trump say, that's just a letter.
I don't recognize your authority.
I'm going to make some excuse to send in the military anyway.
Nope. Trump said, Just tweeted, I keep offering, you keep saying no.
Anytime you want, I can clear this up.
It is so brilliant.
It's simple. I mean, it's such a simple thing to do, to simply follow the rules and not overrule the local mayor while offering to do it in a way that other people think is fairly credible.
Because I think the public believes that Trump actually could stop this in an hour.
I mean, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but he could...
He can stop it quite quickly with enough military presence, especially if there are only 150 people.
How hard would it take any military unit to stop 150 people?
I need some kind of a fact check on that number, because if it's really that few people, it's very misleading, and it would be easier to stop than it looks.
All right. Here's one of the reasons that you can't know who's doing a good job in the coronavirus thing.
You can't know because there are so many variables involved.
And it's, you know, it's apples and oranges.
But here's one of the biggest variables that you wouldn't even think of, typically, if you were trying to decide, okay, which of these national leaders did the best job?
You wouldn't even think of this, but you should, because if you leave it out, you haven't done the analysis right.
Notice that Trump used, I'll call it the excuse or opportunity, of this virus to go hard at China.
He has a built-in reason to be mad at China because of the virus.
So that gives him some justified, and it's the justified part that matters.
He can get really mad at China in public and And it's not sort of an insult to them personally because they kind of know that this is real.
So because the coronavirus really did come from China, and nobody's doubting that, that's now a settled fact, he can go hard at China, but he can also use the opportunity to claw back the manufacturing, which he's doing.
So he's using the crisis, if you will, The coronavirus.
He said, okay, here's an opportunity that doesn't come along all the time.
I can now say publicly and aggressively, we're going to pull back all the manufacturing, American manufacturing that we can, in whatever schedule we can, from China.
How big a deal is that?
Well, if you're talking about the future of the United States, it's a really big deal.
It's one of the biggest things that's ever happened.
Let me say that again.
Trump Starting to bring back manufacturing from China isn't just a good idea.
It's one of the biggest things that will ever happen in this country.
It's that big.
It's gigantic. It changes the whole nature of the world and the balance of power.
Would he have done that and would he have been able to get away with it as effortlessly as it's happening had we not had this crisis?
And here's the key part.
Would another leader in the same situation put into Joe Biden, for example, and say he was president at this time?
Would Joe Biden have said, whoa, here's a chance to pull back all of our manufacturing?
You know, we'll do the easy ones first, like pharmaceuticals, because that's just obvious.
The pharmaceutical part's just a no-brainer.
There's nobody in the United States, I don't think.
I don't think there's anybody in the United States who's saying, yeah, let's leave that over there in China.
What could go wrong? So you do the easy one first.
So Biden might have done that one, because that one's kind of a layup.
Of course you do that one.
But would he have gone beyond that and said, now I'm going to start paying other companies, giving them incentives to also come back?
I think not.
So if you're looking at Trump's performance during the coronavirus, you cannot take out of that the fact that he acted in an opportunity that I believe most presidents If not all of them, Democrat or Republican, most presidents I don't think would have seen that opening.
And I don't think that they would have as aggressively pursued it and gotten away with it so far.
It looks like it's going to be successful.
It's early. So when you're saying, okay, the president messed up on the coronavirus, what you mean is that people died who didn't need to die.
I think we'd agree that that's what you mean.
How do you count the number of people who lived because something that important for the future of the economy got fixed and nobody else would have maybe seen that opening or at least pursued it?
You've got to count that.
What does 1% better GDP mean for how many people live or die in the future?
It means a lot, because there's a very direct connection between your economic well-being and how many people die.
You saw it in the coronavirus, more suicides, crimes up.
So the worst people's situation is, the more death there is.
It just always follows that way.
And that's just one of probably dozens of things that you really can't sort out.
And I always say this, and it gets really quiet when I say this.
In order to say that Trump did a bad job, you would have to say that if you took a leader from some other country, just as a mental experiment, said, all right, let's take the leader of South Korea or New Zealand, and imagine that they're the president of the United States at the time that Trump was, and they're the leaders.
And let's say that they knew everything about America the way Trump does, but it's just that personality and that talent stack from these other leaders that you put in that position.
What ends up different?
Because I'm not aware of anything that Trump did that wasn't what the experts recommended.
Would one of those other great leaders who has such good control over things, would they have known in advance That the test kits that the CDC made at first were bad?
Would the leader of New Zealand, if they were our president, said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
I'm getting some ESP signals.
I can see that the test kits that were made, that we had ready, they're defective.
They don't work. How would any of them?
How would Trump have known that?
How would any of leader known that?
Now, you can say to yourself, wait, wait, wait, wait, Scott.
A good leader would have made sure that had been tested, we're ready, would have made sure we had supplies.
Which leader did that?
Were there any leaders that did that?
I don't think there were any leaders who were smart enough to know if their test kits were the right kind.
That's not really a leader thing.
You can imagine that nobody would have gotten that right.
And as long as all of the leaders would have followed the advice of the experts.
And by the way, as a correction, Trump often says that he was the only one who wanted to close the travel from China.
And I think Fauci says that he was asked about it and agreed.
So fact check that on me.
But I think even the closing of the travel, although...
It seemed to be Trump's idea.
It didn't come from the experts.
Rather, it came from Trump.
But I think Fauci agreed.
I think he did. So fact check that on me.
I might be wrong. But let's see.
There's a bill in the House to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level and then put some kind of a tax on it.
5% tax on legal sales.
And Here's the thing.
Many of us have been surprised that Trump didn't do this himself or advocate for decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level because he talks about it being a state problem.
And if he talks about it that way, why would you leave free money on the table?
It could be that because Trump has such an anti-drug entire history, it just could be something he just can't go there.
Which I would understand.
I don't hate the fact, I do not hate the fact, that we have a president who doesn't drink.
And I don't think that gets nearly enough attention.
Imagine that. Is this our only president who doesn't drink?
Because people drink, and they're still president, and the odds of you, you know, at let's say 11 o'clock on some Saturday night, the odds that you have a drunk president?
Are pretty good. Do you think Hillary would never have been drunk during, you know, on her time off?
But presidents are not really ever completely off duty, right?
If something comes up. So I think that's a way bigger deal than people give him credit for.
But he's so anti-drug, anti-drinking, that maybe he just couldn't be the guy who initiated it.
And I could understand that.
At a human level, at a human level and a role model level, I doubt he would do it for the role model reason, but you can understand it.
But it leaves this big opening for the Democrats to be the ones who initiated it so they can get most of the credit.
But I ask you this.
Will it pass in the Senate?
There could be some problems with the details of it that makes it unsignable.
But what if the Senate passes it and the House passes it?
What is Trump going to do?
I think Trump probably signs it because I think 66% of the public is in favor of it.
I don't think it'll hurt him.
Might help him a little bit.
People are going to ask why he didn't do it before.
But again, he's the only president we've ever had who was this clearly against mind-altering substances.
And I don't think we should lose that.
That's just such a big deal.
You know, you always talk about the The bad role model things he does with his mean tweets.
And there's something to that.
I'm not going to say that there's nothing to that.
There's something to it.
But there's also a lot to the role model part of not being a drinker.
And not being a drug guy.
Alright. So let's hope that Trump does sign that if it happens.
Here's a... We keep learning more about Kyle Rittenhouse, and how close are we to the point where he will be unambiguously just treated as a hero?
Because that's not a safe place to be, because that would really inflame tensions, because some portion of the public thinks he's a white supremacist.
As far as I know, all the evidence suggests he's not.
The evidence that we have Strongly suggests he does not have any kind of association like that, that he was actually just a good citizen, pro-police, trying to help.
It just seems like all the right incentives and actually even a good person who got in a really bad situation.
Now, you could argue that he should not have tried to step up and be useful in the way he did it, you know, bringing a weapon to a place where it was dangerous in the first place.
So I'm not going to support the fact that he showed up at all with a weapon, but I don't think that he had bad intentions.
And once more comes out about what he did or didn't do, and it seems clear that it was either obvious self-defense or arguably self-defense, which should be good enough to not get him convicted on any murder charges, but I worry that he's actually going to become a hero.
And It would be easy to happen, and that would be so divisive.
But I think that's where we're heading, because it's just such a divisive time.
Alright, here is a question for you.
If the fake news did not exist, would these protests and all the violence that comes with it, the looting, etc., would any of that happen without fake news?
I would say, with complete certainty, That these riots slash protests slash looting would not happen without fake news ginning people up.
Now, by fake news, I'll include social media, which is built on an outrage model.
So now you have the formal news, the television news, let's say, mostly television, that is designed to take a side and make you hate the other team.
That's their business model.
The business model of both Fox News and CNN, MSNBC especially.
Those three, their business model is tribal.
To make you love your team and hate that other team.
On top of that is social media, which works on clicks.
The more clicks, the better. And what gives you more clicks than violence and getting people to have their hair set on fire?
So under these conditions of the fake news plus social media's business model, this had to happen.
It wasn't even a case of these things are supportive of those things happening.
No, it's way worse than that.
This or some version of what you're seeing had to happen once social media and the news had Had enough cumulative impact on people's brains.
So our brains have literally been, literally, this is not hyperbole, actually physically rewired.
I guess that's not technically literally.
But your brain has changed.
Your actual structure of your brain, the chemistry of your brain, has been programmed.
By these two kinds of business models, the news and social media, to be different than it was.
And it was programmed to be more confrontational.
And as long as that continued and it was cumulative and you were more and more confrontational, it was very predictable that the people who would, let's say the ones who would go first, the most gullible...
And I hate to say it, but it is the most gullible.
The people believing the news, the people who believe that the president called white supremacists in Charlottesville fine people, if you believe that, how would you act?
Imagine you lived in a country...
I'll take myself.
Imagine if I believed that the president had actually said that.
Would I be in favor of him being removed by any means whatsoever?
Well, I might not say it in public, but if we actually had a white supremacist president, and I believe that that were true, I might not say out loud that some kind of non-election removal was at least okay with me.
I might say in public, no, gotta follow the Constitution.
But privately, just as a human, I might be thinking, you know, I don't care what it takes.
You know, if somehow we accidentally got a Hitler in charge, I'm not that concerned about the legal process.
Whatever it takes to get rid of a Hitler, you know, sometimes you got to do what you got to do, right?
So I could easily see that if I were as gullible as, I don't know, I think the ratio Rasmussen found that Something like half of Democrats actually believe that to be true.
If I believed it, I think I'd be fairly sympathetic with the protesters.
I wouldn't be sympathetic with the damage and the violence, but I'd be sympathetic with the movement more than I am.
So, yeah, it's definitely fake news and social media's business model that's causing this, but I think you also have to have On top of that, a complete lack of competence in local management, meaning the mayors and the governors of some states, not all of them, because it's not a coincidence that there are certain places that these protests are thriving, and there are other places where, let's say, they wouldn't last as long.
You know what I mean? There are more red cities, if you will, that this just wouldn't happen.
And if it did, it wouldn't happen as long.
So you need incompetence locally, and you need a lot of incompetence.
You need probably foreign funding.
If it turns out that someday in the future we have never learned that these protests were funded by non-Americans, I would be kind of amazed.
Now, I don't have evidence No direct kind of evidence that there's some foreign influence, China, Russia, Soros.
Pick your boogeyman, whoever you want.
Just pick whoever you want.
Somebody said 59% of Democrats actually believe the fine people hoax.
But they also believe the Green New Deal is a good deal.
They believe that the president...
Once suggested drinking bleach to cure coronavirus, they believed a lot of things.
And if you're that gullible, you don't want to live in a world where all the news is fake.
That's a bad combination.
But I think the other coincidence that had to happen was the coronavirus.
I don't think that without the coronavirus...
Well, if the coronavirus was not part of the picture, I think the demonstrations would happen but would be smaller and wouldn't last.
There's something about being able to wear a mask without being a masked person.
In other words, I'm just wearing a mask because it's a pandemic.
I'm protesting during a pandemic.
Of course I'd wear a mask.
I believe that wearing a mask emboldens you.
And that although the so-called black block part of Antifa Well, suddenly, anybody with a mask is going to be bolder, because there's one less risk.
All these cameras around, and you're saying to yourself, well, I don't know if I would throw this brick with all these cameras around if I had my face You know, visible.
But if I've got a coronavirus mask on, I've got a brick in my hand, maybe I throw it.
So I think you had to have the coronavirus.
You had to have terrible local leadership.
You had to have complete fake news.
You had to have gullible people, but of course that's a given.
And you had to have the right weather.
You had to have warm enough weather.
It had to be the summer. It had to be an election year.
It's basically every possible thing that could line up to create this situation has lined up.
Which is why Trump will win handily, it looks like.
Alright. That is...
Every once in a while, because I'm a cartoonist, and part of what makes things funny is oversimplifying them.
So you take a situation that everybody understands and they're mad about it, but it's a complicated situation, and you find a way to summarize that big complicated thing in just a few words that is often funny.
Because you shouldn't be taking a complicated situation and dismissing it with just a few words.
And if you do, and if those few words actually sound like you hit the heart of the problem, even if it's wrong, just, you know, your bias says, oh yeah, that's what's happening with that complicated situation, you've got something funny.
And I read on Twitter, I didn't write down who said it, but that Black Lives Matter is now just teachers and felons.
Teachers and felons.
And I thought to myself, first of all, that's not anywhere close to being true.
You know, if you took all the protesters, most of them are not teachers.
Most of them are not felons.
They might become felons during the protests, but they didn't show up that way.
Most of them. But as a simplification that just captures that whole vibe, when you say that Black Lives Matter is nothing but teachers and felons, and again, the felons part is not a racial thing.
Because I think there are more white people in black lives better than there are black people.
So saying they're felons, that doesn't have a racial component.
If you imagine there is, you're imagining it.
But teachers and felons.
And I thought, yeah, it feels right, even though I know it's not close to true.
All right. Those are the things...
That are happening. It looks like there's not much else in the way of news.
Brandon Straka and his walkaway rally is in SF, Golden Gate, on the Golden Gate Bridge this morning.
Somebody is saying. Somebody says that they appreciate that I do this.
I don't know what this is exactly.
You might be talking about a specific opinion or you talk about the periscopes in general.
Yeah, now have you been enjoying how often I have been tweeting hashtag artist when somebody comes after me on Twitter and they're completely irrational and they demonstrate that they don't understand anything about the situation that they're mad about?
I always check their profile.
It's usually a musician or a writer or some kind of visual artist.
And I just say hashtag artist.
Now you should adopt this method.
If you're attacked online, Don't argue with artists.
If there are artists who demonstrate that they don't have critical thinking.
There are plenty of artists who are artists in addition to doing things that gave them some critical thinking.
Some people are just born able to do it.
Some people were just born able to do critical thinking.
It's just somehow they have it.
They could also be artists.
So there are no 100% generalizations at work.
But... Once you see that the problem is not what they understand or their priorities or anything, it's literally a lack of their talent stack.
Their talent stack simply doesn't have the skills that would allow them to have the same opinion as someone who has skills.
And they don't know it.
So as long as the people who don't have talent, and I'll say talent in decision-making, You know, say, economics, business, risk management, you know, real-world mathematical risk-taking understanding.
If they don't have that, they also don't know they don't have it, which is the problem.
If they knew they didn't have those skills, they probably wouldn't weigh in so angrily, imagining that they did.
So that's actually what's happening.
Between the fake news and the social media, The people they're riling up is what I'll call the artist class.
Because the rational people, the people who have bigger talent stacks, they've seen more, they have a better understanding of how the world works, are just not falling for all of the gullible stuff.
As much. Alright.
Looking at your comments.
Somebody says, you're the only artist I argue with.
Well, you know, I've never called myself an artist.
So even though the thing I do, cartooning and writing, certainly fall into the category that I would call art, the way I do it doesn't really fall into that category.
The way I draw, the quality of my artistic talents, if you will, is so modest that calling myself an artist, it doesn't even sound right to me.
I've always called myself an entrepreneur.
Who tries lots of things.
Cartooning is one of the ones that worked.
So other things have worked.
You know, I was also a highly paid corporate public speaker for a long time.
Now, was that art?
I don't know. Is giving a public speech an art?
Sort of. A skill, maybe.
I don't know. Somewhere in there.
But... I'm just looking at some comments going by here.
Small restaurants going bankrupt, half of them, somebody's saying.
You know, let me tell you something about small restaurants that you probably didn't know.
Half of them are always going bankrupt, and 90% of them are going to go bankrupt if they're not going bankrupt at the moment.
There's something going on that nobody wants to say out loud, so I'll say it out loud.
A large number of the businesses that failed or are failing or will fail because of the coronavirus were going to fail anyway.
It did speed it up, but as other smart people have said, all of our trends got accelerated.
It looks like, if you look at it quickly, you'd say, oh, these things broke.
Well, yes, a whole bunch of things broke and people went broke and bankrupt.
That's true. But what really happened was a trend that had to happen just happened a little quicker, such as telecommuting.
I don't think there was any chance that telecommuting wasn't going to be a bigger deal because traffic got worse and rents and living in the city was bad, etc.
But it got accelerated.
And most of those restaurants would have gone out of business.
Now here's why. I have, unfortunately, restaurant experience.
If you have an independent restaurant And you've got, let's say, so much market demand and you get your share.
You're doing okay. You're not getting rich.
If you've got a restaurant, an independent restaurant, with a few exceptions, if you have a celebrity chef, I suppose, but they're not getting rich.
They're just sort of getting by.
As soon as a cheesecake factory shows up within driving distance, You lose 10% of your customers.
Because the Cheesecake Factory just absorbs from all the restaurants the day it goes in.
It's bigger, has more seats, and it serves so many types of food, and it does a really good job.
The food is excellent. I would say the service, food, ambiance.
Cheesecake Factory does a really good job.
Now, if they don't go bankrupt, maybe they are, I don't know, but if they don't, They were always going to be the Walmart or the Amazon that put that small restaurant out of business.
When I closed my two restaurants a number of years ago, it was right after the Cheesecake Factory moved in and also P.F. Chang's.
If you want to hear the worst luck that a restaurant owner ever had, this happened to me.
I had two restaurants at one point.
I was a co-owner. One of the restaurants right across the street, they opened a mall of restaurants.
It was a mall of nothing but restaurants.
An entire complex of nothing but competitors to me across the street who had no competitors until then, not within walking distance.
So I had a restaurant that was in a busy area, but you couldn't even walk from that restaurant, I don't think, Yeah, you couldn't even walk to another restaurant.
It was that far away from another one.
And directly across the street, not just a good restaurant, not just a couple of competitors, which of course I would have expected, but a mall of restaurants.
I didn't even know that was a thing.
Have you ever heard of a mall of restaurants?
Who has that happened to him?
Anyway, the point is that the small restaurants were doomed anyway.
It was a matter of time.
So the long-term economic fallout from this is going to be less than, you think, not more.
Because the things that failed were going to fail and they weren't making much money anyway.
So maybe some of those people were free to work on something more productive.
Something that had more lasting ability.
Alright. Cheesecake Factory next to malls is bankrupt.
If you put a cheesecake factory in a mall and the mall itself died, you do have some big problems.
Alright, you got lots of comments today, but I don't have much else to say.
