Episode 1113 Scott Adams: How to Know the "Losers and Suckers" HOAX is Fake News, How to Avoid a Civil War, Voting Twice
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Idolizing criminals as a political strategy
American tricked into writing Pro-Russian propaganda
Mail-In voting dangers, considerations
New alcohol consumption guidelines
Obvious BS HOAX, by Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg
Avoiding a post-election civil war
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Goes well with the Fine People hoax, the Drinking Bleach hoax, the Overfeeding the Goldfish hoax, and all of the other hoaxes.
But first, what do you need first?
To get ready for all this excitement, I think you know.
You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or gels or 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 unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it's happening right now.
Go. Mmm.
I feel the soul of Michael Forrest Rehanoll going to hell.
That's good coffee. Makes everything better.
Alright, good news on the economy, or as people who don't like President Trump call it, very bad news.
That's right, we can't even tell the difference between good news and bad news.
For example, is it good news that the unemployment rate has improved all the way to 8.4%, surpassing the estimates of experts?
You would think that would be good news, wouldn't you?
But no, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, that good news is filled with bad news.
And if you add enough bad news together, I guess it just looks like good news to people who don't know any better, like me.
But there's some core long-term employment numbers within those numbers that don't look so good.
So I think it is true that there's some internals that are weak, but...
If you're an optimist, you look at the big numbers.
If you're a pessimist, you dig in there and find something to complain about.
And they did. Amazingly, one quarter of all the people who were employed in August in the United States worked from home.
Worked from home.
One quarter of the United States worked from home.
What? That's not going to change.
I mean, the one-quarter part will change.
But if you thought we were going back to a commuting society, I don't know.
I mean, the biggest reason to go back to that commuting way of life would be to get out of the house.
So I guess there'll be some of that.
Here's my favorite peak 2020 story.
There was a... Professor of African History at George Washington University.
It matters to the story that she was a professor of American history.
And she recently admitted that she'd been living her life a lie, and that for all of her adult life, she had claimed to be an African American woman, when in fact she had zero African American, I guess you would just say African, Background.
She was literally just a white girl who had lived her life and looks exactly like a white girl and lived her life just telling people she was black.
And people...
And what's funny about this is that nobody wanted to challenge it because the people she was dealing with Nobody wants to be in that fight, right?
If somebody says they're black, it's not really up to somebody else to tell them they're not.
And that's not really the conversation you want to get into.
You know you can't win.
But the fact that she took it so far that she became a professor of African American history, and you have to ask yourself, Could a real white person get hired to be a professor of African history?
I don't know what the hiring practices are, but if I had to venture a guess, I would say you really couldn't get hired for that job, as I understand the world and the way it works.
I don't think you get hired for that job unless they think you're African American.
And I can just wonder what that job interview looked like.
It's like, yeah, yeah, I'm African American, and I'd like to be a professor of African history.
And you can see the administrators, whoever's doing the hiring, saying, I really want to say something right now, such as, you're obviously not black, but I could be wrong about that.
And I'm not going to take a 1% chance of being wrong because, you know, it is true that people can look different from their ethnicity.
That's a real thing. It's just it wasn't the thing in this case.
So everything about that story is hilarious in the sense of really understanding where we're at and how humans are wired.
All right. My favorite other story of the day.
I'm typically not happy about somebody getting gunned down.
Usually that's a bad thing.
But not in this case.
If the person is Michael Forrest Reinol.
Now Reinol, as you know, is a cousin of Cornholio.
If you've ever watched Beavis and Butthead, you know Cornholio.
This guy's cousin.
And anyway, he was the guy who allegedly...
Allegedly and admittedly shot the Trump supporter who I guess was a pro-police person.
Now think about this.
This guy murdered somebody who was demonstrating in favor of police.
The police show up.
How happy are they to shoot this guy?
Now, what was not reported in the story is how many bullet holes are in Michael Forrest Reinhold.
How many bullet holes do you think he has in them?
Well, we'll probably hear a lot about it because I assume there'll be a mass protest because isn't that what happens when someone gets shot by the police?
Don't we have a mass protest to demonstrate against police brutality?
Oh wait, let me check his...
Nope, nope, not for him.
Turns out we don't have a mass protest for a murderous white man.
Now I would like to see if I can crawl a little bit closer to getting cancelled.
My trick here is that if I only go a little bit each time, it'll be hard to cancel me for a specific thing because it'll just be, oh, but not that one thing you said.
That just moved it 1%.
We're really waiting for the one we can nail you on.
But we know it's coming.
All right, so here's me getting a little closer to the cancellation.
If you knew there were two Groups of people, let's say in a country or anywhere else, and the only difference, let's say the only difference between the two groups is that one of them idolized its criminals, and the other said it's a good day when their criminals get shot and killed.
Which of those two groups will do better in society?
Would it be the group that Keeps as heroes criminals?
Or would it be the group that says, thank you for shooting our criminals?
One of those two groups is going to be more successful.
So keep that in mind.
And I've said before that we should stop sorting the world into ethnicity and gender.
Instead, we should sort the world into strategy.
Very much the way we're looking at the coronavirus response.
Is anybody looking at the coronavirus response and saying, how did the black people do?
No. No.
Quite appropriately, that's not a question.
Is anybody looking at the coronavirus responses across countries and saying, how did the Asians do?
Not exactly, because it's not really an appropriate question.
What we are asking is, how did this strategy work?
How did the Swedish strategy work?
How did the US strategy work?
How did Taiwan or New Zealand's strategy work?
Isn't that the right way to look at it?
To look at what people did, and if you did these things, did it work better than the people who did these things?
That is a productive way to look at the world.
But when we're looking at our own citizens and who's succeeding and who isn't, we don't do that.
We don't look at the ones who have good strategy and say, all right, let's just look at the ones with good strategy.
Now, if you took all the people with good strategy and within the group of good strategy, the black people, for example, let's say they weren't doing as well.
Well, now you've got a real problem.
That really has isolated racism, I would say.
Could be systemic racism, could be ordinary racism against an individual.
But if they're using the same strategy and they're getting different outcomes, that would be the most worrisome thing.
But if people are getting different outcomes with completely different strategies, why are we even talking about their ethnicity?
How does that even come into the conversation?
What does their gender have to do with it if they're doing different things?
You've got to do the same thing or else you can't be analyzed for whether racism is in that equation.
It's always in the equation, but identifying it is hard unless you isolate the other variables.
So here's another funny thing.
We'll get to the hoax of the day in a little bit.
B. Machiavelli on Twitter had this funny tweet.
He said, I'm voting twice, once in the polls for Biden and once in the booth for Trump.
I think that's going to describe a lot of people.
And he showed a picture of himself wearing a Biden hat on the outside, but under his jacket was a Trump shirt.
And I thought to myself, I think I'm going to get a Biden hat Because if you're going out in public, a Biden hat would work a little bit like a hard hat, wouldn't it?
You wear a hard hat into a construction zone because you don't want heavy objects to hit you in the head.
If you go into a public place in 2020, you also don't want something to hit you in the head.
Because it turns out that being in any kind of a crowded situation in 2020, it's probably a riot.
Or something that's going to become one.
And you are worried about getting hit in the head.
So you can't protect yourself completely.
But I would wear a Biden baseball cap.
It would greatly reduce the odds of me getting hit in the head in public.
So it's like a hard hat.
And somebody else said, I think it was Brian Rosen, said...
This is saying, Biden in the streets and Trump between the sheets.
I modified his statement there to add, between Biden in the streets and Trump between the sheets.
All right. So that's funny.
Another funny story is there was an American who was tricked into writing Russian disinformation.
So he was some guy who was out of work, but he wanted to be a writer.
And he saw a publication called Peace Data.
You know the prestigious publication Peace Data?
You probably subscribe to it, don't you?
I mean, who hasn't read a copy of Peace Data, that well-known publication?
And The so-called editor, who was not a real person, he was actually a computer-generated photo, which is scary because it looks exactly like a person, and that whoever was behind the fake identity contacted him and paid him a few hundred dollars per article to write articles that apparently they would select to be pro-Russian propaganda.
Apparently the same Russian troll farm that did the Facebook ads is associated with this disinformation.
And I think to myself, the funniest thing about the Russian troll farm is how bad they were and how completely ineffective they were.
Yeah, they existed.
Yes, there seems to be good evidence.
That they made memes that were interfering with the election.
But they were so bad, the memes.
They looked like, I've said this many times, they looked like a high school project.
And they didn't even put much money into them.
And they didn't even persuade in the same direction.
They were completely amateurish work.
And now they've added to this, hiring 26-year-olds to write articles for a publication that nobody reads.
Peace data. And I think to myself, is this really the finest Russian disinformation?
Or is it disinformation to get caught doing something that's so amateurish that when you catch them, you say, well, I guess we don't have to worry about Russia.
I mean, look how easy they were to catch.
Look how weak their effort was.
But are they so clever that they actually have a super clever thing that's going on that they're diverting our attention?
We'd never see it because they've acted so intentionally stupid on this other one.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know if this is a super clever diversion or if Russia is just really, really, really bad at interfering with elections.
I don't want to brag, but I could interfere with our election better all by myself.
I wouldn't even need the KGB, whoever they are.
The intelligence agency of Russia, I wouldn't even need their help.
They could say, we'll give you a few hundred dollars if you...
I'd say, eh, keep it.
I got this.
I could interfere with an election so much better than Russia.
Even Howard Kurtz is calling President Trump's piece, or at least whoever did the title to the piece, called it a masterstroke when he suggested voting twice.
Now, I feel as if I was one of the first people to be on to this method, which is the president says, and how many times have I said exactly this, he'll say something that is a little bit wrong, But it's the wrongness, or a lot wrong, it's the wrongness that makes you unable to look away.
If he said things that were ordinary, you'd say, okay, fine, and then you'd go on with your business.
But if he says something that you know to be wrong or dangerous or provocative or just too far over the line, you can't look away.
All of your attention will go to that thing, even if you don't want it to, even if you know it's a trick, It's just good technique.
And so Howard Kurtz has called out in his article, and I think he's completely right, that when the president suggested that maybe you should do a mail-in vote and then go vote in person anyway, and then cheekily he suggested that you couldn't do it anyway.
So even if you tried to break the law, it wouldn't be possible.
Because the people who oppose the president have told us it's not possible.
They would immediately flag it as, oh, no, you've already voted by mail.
You don't need to vote by machine.
But your common sense and everything you know about the government, everything you know about human beings, everything you know about complicated situations, everything you know about bureaucracy, everything you know about politics is screaming in your head, this mail-in vote thing is a problem.
And so the president makes you think about that problem and also gives you a specific challenge.
Do you think you could vote twice?
And I'll tell you, I don't think there's anybody on either side who doesn't think that you could vote twice.
Is there? Is there even one person in the United States who is such a simpleton that they believe you couldn't vote twice?
You could vote twice.
Don't do it. I think it's a federal offense, right?
Sounds like a bad deal.
But if you had, let's say, mailed your ballot not too long ago, I'm not sure when the mailing deadline is, but if you'd mailed your ballot not too long ago, do you think that somebody at the voting booth or the voting area would have in their extensively accurate records that your ballot got counted?
I don't think so.
So it's kind of brilliant the president has made people think about this and makes his point well taken.
I hope that it doesn't cause people to vote twice and go to jail or even just ruin the election.
You don't want that.
So that's why only Trump would even say something like that, because it's so dangerous That you say to yourself, ah!
But how many times has the president done something that was dangerous, that worked out fine?
He kind of does it a lot.
I think I'll drone Salomon A. No, you can't do that.
Okay, that worked. I think I'll move the embassy to Jerusalem.
You can't! Okay, that worked.
I think I'll say the Golan Heights belongs to Israel.
You can't! Okay, that seemed to work okay.
You can't start a trade war.
Okay, China seems to be getting flexible now.
I guess you can. So every time he does something that's way too dangerous, fairly consistently it seems to work out.
Which means that he has a better sense of what is really dangerous and what isn't.
So far. Alright, but I... And the people who are saying that there's no history of mail fraud in this country probably are right in terms of big enough fraud to sway an election.
But we know at the same time that there's definite fraud, you know, individual cases that can be verified.
In the news recently, there was somebody who admitted he was part of organized efforts to change mail votes.
So we know that it happens on the small But the argument is that it's never happened enough in history where there was mail-in to make a difference.
To which I say, that doesn't make sense.
That's not an argument.
It's not an argument that it hasn't been a problem in the past.
Because 2020 is not like the past.
It's not like it in terms of what kind of mail-in votes it will be.
It's different if you request a ballot, you're probably a real person.
If they just send you ballots, well, you're going to get somebody else's ballot in the mail.
And you may or may not fill it out.
So there are lots of weaknesses in 2020 that just wouldn't have existed before.
What about the states, several states who have had mail-in voting for a while?
Did they get it right on the first try?
Probably not. Probably took a little bit of scrubbing the database.
Probably had to set up some systems to double check stuff.
If you did all that, you might be in good shape.
But we haven't done all that.
And we don't have any baseline for which to compare our results this year.
The one thing that's the biggest change this year is that no matter what the results are, Mail-in vote or even regular vote, you're not going to know if that's what it should have been.
Imagine, if you will, that you're some state and it's not 2020.
It's sometime in the not-too-distant past.
You were thinking about going to mail-in votes.
You could look at all your prior elections where people voted in person.
You could say, okay, if our mail-in votes come in really close to what we voted in person, then we'll say, all right, that looks like the mail-ins and the in-person were kind of close.
But if it's 2020 and it's a coronavirus year, you don't know what's going to happen and how that will compare to any prior year.
So this is the most dangerous situation because the mail-in vote could say almost anything and you would have a poll that supports it because the polls in many cases are false.
So there will always be at least one poll This supports, no matter what the outcome is, there will be at least one poll that says, yeah, look, we predicted it.
It's not that uncommon for only one or two polls to be close.
This is just like that.
Yeah, it's a Biden by 10.
Look at my poll. I've got a poll that said he was going to win this state by 10.
There you go. The other polls didn't say that.
But that's not unusual.
It's not unusual that only a few polls are really good and other ones are not, so there's no baseline.
How would you know this is false?
Anyway, so that's happening.
I would like to, before we talk about the new hoax, I would like to remind you And there will probably only be a few people on this periscope who ever heard me say this because it was so long ago.
Can you, in the comments, confirm that maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I first started saying the following.
You know all those scientific studies that show that moderate drinking is good for your health?
I alone on planet Earth said, yeah, there are a lot of those studies.
They keep producing a new one.
And each time, each time it seems to show that moderate drinking is actually good for you.
And what did I say?
Fake. Every one of the studies, fake.
I said that 10 to 15 years ago.
Did somebody else said that too?
Oh, good. We've got some confirmation.
So there are people on the comments who are saying that they confirmed that I've been saying for years that those studies would be debunked.
And today, the Wall Street Journal, in an article saying that men should not have more than one drink per day, that's A new lower standard.
The article just brushes aside those prior studies and says that more recent studies have debunked them, and it was a selection bias problem.
That's right. It was a selection bias.
They were picking people who probably had a Mediterranean diet, is what the Wall Street Journal speculated.
So the people who knew that...
Who knew it from the first moment that it was fake news?
Those are the people you should listen to in the future.
Now, if I'd only ever gotten one prediction right, well, that doesn't mean much.
But look at the body of my predictions, but especially look at the ones where I've debunked a news story.
No matter how much evidence there was for that news story, that I debunked it publicly and was right.
So, you know, we're still looking at the Cuban sonic weapon, or the Cuban embassy sonic weapon.
I said from moment one, there's no sonic weapon.
None has been found.
It's been a long time.
I think we would have found the sonic weapon by now.
When the shooting happened in Las Vegas, and even people were saying it's ISIS, I said on day one, this is not ISIS. ISIS claimed credit for it.
I still said in public, even though ISIS has a long history of not claiming credit for things unless it was pretty real, might have been one exception, I still said even though they've claimed credit, it's not ISIS. And it wasn't.
So look at my record, and now let's talk about this newest record.
Hoax. So the newest hoax comes from The Atlantic.
Jeffrey Goldberg, I guess, wrote it.
And the claim is that there are four anonymous sources who said that Trump didn't want to go to the event in France to honor the service people for World War II, I guess.
Or was it one? But anyway, he canceled the visit, and they're saying it's because he didn't want to get his hair messed up.
So that's the first part.
And then the second part, allegedly...
I can't believe they even write this bullshit.
They claim that Trump labeled as losers Marines who died in the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I. Referring to the war, Trump allegedly asked, who are the good guys in this war?
And that...
And he called them losers and suckers if they died in the war.
Now, if you can't tell that that's not true, if you can't tell that's not true just by listening to it, then I've taught you nothing.
But I will reiterate the lesson.
Here are all the signs that this is an obvious hoax.
And there were so many of them, I literally ran out of room writing down all the obvious flags for this big hoax.
Number one, the timing.
The timing, you know, close to an election.
Definitely ramps up the chance that somebody would make something up, especially if Biden looks like he's in a little bit of trouble.
If Biden had a commanding lead, you wouldn't see as much fake news, because they wouldn't need it.
So in this situation, do they need fake news to beat Trump?
And I would say yes, because the real news isn't going to be negative enough.
They needed fake news, and they needed it now.
Now, that alone doesn't make it fake news, right?
That should just make your antenna start vibrating.
It's like, alright, that's not enough to tell me if it's real or not real, but I'm on the lookout.
Alright, so that's your first flag.
Number two, we know that...
The Democrats have admitted that they're going to be using artificial intelligence to figure out how to manipulate and brainwash the masses.
They don't use those words, but as clearly as I'm expressing it, they have expressed it.
They just use different words.
Now, what would it look like if an AI came up with a line of attack?
What would it look like?
Have you seen the articles about AI trying to write a blog post and it actually fooled people?
And you can look at it and you can see that when an artificial intelligence tries to write an article pretending to be a human, it does have some tells in it.
And the first tell is that it seems to be based on frequency of keywords.
In other words, if it picks up a tendency, it doesn't have any intelligence really on that, But it just picks up the tendency.
So, okay, people are talking about this.
This word gets used a lot.
I'll throw that into the sentence.
I'll make grammar that makes sense, and boom, it looks like a person said it.
So, here's the tell that this wasn't human-generated.
Or, if it was human-generated, somebody who's not good at it.
And what I mean is not good at writing.
Okay? So, In order to create a good hoax, the best kind of hoax is one...
I'll wind back to my point.
We'll get to a point here. A good hoax is one that only the person who is the subject of the hoax believes.
That's your best hoax.
Because if it's something that everybody believed, that's pretty rare, first of all.
But you want something that only the subject believes.
I'll give you an example. Let's say I was such a narcissist...
That I believe that even at my current age and with my current unpleasant look, that I could be a model because I believe, and I'm the only one who believes this, that I'm really just so sexy that, yeah, I'm an older guy and I don't have anything that a model would typically have.
I have glasses, I'm bald, you know, blah, blah, blah.
But a perfect hoax for me, if I were believing that I was model beautiful and nobody else did, would be to call me under a fake name and say, hey, you don't know me, but I'm a model agent.
I'd like to hire you to be a famous model.
Now, the reason that's a good hoax is I'm the only person who would fall for that in this scenario.
Everybody else who was watching the hoax would know in a heartbeat it's not true, because just look at me.
So I'm the only person who would have the blind spot.
That's a good hoax.
And here's how that blind spot fits with the AI and with the bad writer concept.
The initial, you want to build a hoax around a kernel of truth.
And here are the kernels of truth.
Number one, can you believe that the president would say something unpleasant about somebody?
Yes. As a general statement, the president could insult people.
Would you believe that he might say something crueler behind closed doors than he might say in public?
Yes. Completely believable that anybody really would be a little more unguarded, not in public.
But here's the part.
Remember where Trump said something about McCain being captured and prisoner of war?
I forget the exact words, but Trump quipped, and probably wishes he hadn't, that he prefers people who didn't get caught.
Now, here's the trick.
If you have a sense of humor...
You know that that was nothing but a joke.
And it was a joke about McCain.
It wasn't a joke about people in the service.
It wasn't a joke about prisoners of war.
But it so easily became that when the public got a hold of it that it was probably a mistake.
He shouldn't have done that joke.
The first thing you need to know is that one third of the public doesn't understand a joke.
Doesn't even recognize it.
And you saw that in that story, a lot of the coverage failed to understand that it was a joke.
Somebody says it was a Dave Chappelle joke.
No, it was a Chris Rock joke.
Trump actually used the same joke, and I don't know if he saw it from Chris Rock, I think Chris Rock did it first, about McCain.
And he said, you know, he's a hero, but some version of, you know, I prefer people who don't get caught.
Now, the reason it's funny is because it's terrible.
It's the terribleness of it that makes it funny.
Because when you're thinking, and your head is in the American prisoner of war military hero model, so your brain is thinking the greatest amount of respect, and then you hear somebody make this clever witticism that takes this greatest amount of respect you could ever have, And reduces it down to, I like people who didn't get caught.
It just turns them into somebody who was bumbling, is hilarious.
And it's hilarious because it's so inappropriate.
If you take out the fact that it's inappropriate, it's not a joke.
It's only a joke because it's inappropriate, and overtly inappropriate in a way that's intended and designed to make you laugh.
Now, if you didn't know that Trump was doing the same joke, Literally the same joke.
Not almost the same joke.
The same joke as Chris Rock.
And he delivers with a straight face most of the time.
He doesn't laugh at his own jokes.
So the news was like, we're not sure.
So it allowed a third of the people to believe that he really said that and really meant it.
And he had some animus against even a prisoner of war that he would speak disrespectfully for.
Now, if you believe that that was true, and you didn't understand that it was always a joke, and it was always just about McCain, it was never about service people, if you didn't know it was a joke, how easy would it be for you to believe that he said a similarly disrespectful thing in another circumstance?
It's really easy. So if you are going to design, let's say you are an AI, and you are going to design a hoax, you would start with one that's got a little bit of confirmation bias already built in.
The part where people are already primed to think that Trump would say something like that behind closed doors.
So that's perfect.
But here's the tell that it was an AI or a human who's really bad at writing.
A good human writer would have known it was a joke and would have made the new thing also a joke.
That's the part that's missing.
If this story, this obvious hoax that was written in The Atlantic, if this obvious hoax had gone the extra mile and turned this new allegation, this obviously didn't happen, but if they put it in the form of a joke...
They could have sold it.
Because that's how you know it wasn't Trump.
Trump leaves a signature with these things.
The joke. We just talked about Trump saying you should vote twice.
That has Trump's signature on it.
You could take that story and remove it from Trump and say, who said this?
And most of the world would say, okay, that's funny because it's so inappropriate.
Why is it funny to say you should vote twice?
Because it's so inappropriate.
That's what's funny.
Is it funny to say that Trump likes people who didn't get caught?
Very inappropriate.
That's why it's funny.
The Trump sense of humor has a fingerprint to it that's sort of unmistakable if you're a good writer.
If you're an AI, you don't see it.
Because you just see the keywords.
If you're a bad writer, or you didn't know he meant it as a joke the first time you saw it, you would not make your hoax include a joke either.
Because you would think, well, it's more true to the original if I just play it straight.
But Trump doesn't.
That's your biggest tell.
So Trump would never just say a thing that would get him Obviously, if he had ever said that out loud, he would know that it would get back to people.
He would know it would be the end of his presidency if people believed it.
So, the odds of him having said that are zero, essentially.
Alright, here's some more tells.
Number one, not number one, CNN is downplaying it.
I looked on CNN's page because I thought, okay, is this going to be like The major story?
Because it's just like Red Me.
It's like, oh, we got another thing.
Nope. CNN put it on the far right in one no picture, just text, and just treated it like an allegation.
CNN did not pounce.
Do you know why?
Do you know why CNN did not pounce?
By the way, MSNBC did pounce.
Do you know why CNN didn't pounce?
Isn't it exactly the right kind of story for CNN to pounce on?
Can you think of anything that would be more red meat for CNN than this story?
And they didn't pounce on it.
They're playing it a little bit soft.
Now, that may have changed even since I saw it this morning.
But the initial reaction...
Was to downplay it.
What does that tell you?
It tells you they know it's not true and they can't take another hit.
CNN is obviously wounded by all the fake news it has promoted and it just can't take another hit and this one is so obviously not true that even CNN couldn't take a chance on it.
That's another flag.
The other flag is that it's in the Atlantic.
The Atlantic is not anything close to a credible news organization.
They would be closer to Russia today, closer to, I don't know, less credible than the National Enquirer.
Now, I don't know what they used to be, but in 2020, the Atlantic is a gigantic flashing sign that says, whatever you read and hear is not true.
It's probably the most fake news publication in America.
Coincidence? Is it a coincidence that this did not appear in, say, the New York Times?
It wasn't their scoop.
It wasn't the scoop of, let's say, even the Washington Post, as disreputable as they are.
It had to be in the Atlantic, because who else is going to publish four anonymous sources today?
A basic journalist's standard is if you can't get at least one person to go on the record.
Maybe you don't publish that.
So anonymous sources is, of course, a big red flag.
The Atlantic, a big red flag.
The author, Jeffrey Goldberg, a big red flag.
The fact that it was written like an AI or a bad writer instead of having that signature humor that Trump has.
Big red flag. The timing of it.
Big red flag. The fact that Biden needs a Hail Mary pass to win.
Big red flag. I mean, this is just flags all the way.
But here's the most obvious one.
It's a little too on the nose.
It's a little too perfect.
Have I told you that if you hear, let's say there are two news stories.
One news story is a shark attacks a surfer.
Now, if you heard that story, you'd say, well, it doesn't happen a lot, but that's a thing.
You know, that could happen.
But let's say you heard this story.
A man attacks a shark with just his bare teeth, and he kills his shark by biting it to death.
If you heard that story, would you need research to know it's fake?
You shouldn't. Immediately upon hearing it, you should say, ah, that just by its nature, I know didn't happen.
And the Trump story about the losers and the suckers, that has that written all over it.
It has the exact look of, yeah, no, a man bit a shark.
No, seriously. Seriously, a man bit a shark and he killed the shark with his jaws.
Ironically, with his jaws, he bit the shark to death.
Yeah, that happened. That totally happened.
You shouldn't need to do research to know that that didn't happen.
So this is in that class.
All right. I got a few more.
Oh, here's another one. One of the sources is Malcolm Nance.
Now, if you've never heard that name before, the only thing you need to know is if you were looking for a big red flag that a story is not true, associating it with Malcolm Nance would be the biggest of the big flags.
There's no name, I don't think, I don't think there's another name in America that would be less credible than Malcolm Nance.
You can do your own Googling to find out why I'm saying that.
But just the fact that that's the source, if you knew nothing else and you knew he was the source, you should immediately discount this as ridiculous.
How about the fact that even John Bolton debunked it in his book?
So part of the claim about why Trump didn't go to the ceremony, the new claim is he didn't want to get his hair disheveled in the wind, which is ridiculous because Trump does lots of outdoor events all the time.
But the fact that Bolton tells a completely different version of that story, and Bolton hates the president.
Bolton doesn't like the president, and even he told a completely different version.
So if you know that part of the story Almost certainly has to be false because even Bolton told a different version.
Then the rest of it's false.
If a big part of it can be confirmed to not be true, and I think the John Bolton thing is about as close as you can get to a confirmation, then no credibility for the rest.
How about does it work?
Let's talk about whether the hoax will work.
Here's the bad news.
Yes. Yes, that hoax could actually cost Trump the election.
It's actually that powerful.
It's as powerful as the fine people hoax, and it will work the same way, which is that people who want to believe it's true are just going to believe it's true and there's nothing you can do to talk them out of it.
Now, can you prove something didn't happen?
No, that's the beauty of this.
You can't prove something didn't happen.
You can't prove a negative.
You can sometimes prove things did happen, but it's not a thing to prove something didn't happen.
All you can know is that you don't have evidence.
That's all you can know.
You can't prove it didn't happen, generally speaking.
So it's sort of perfect that way.
I would expect that some number of people will believe this, and it will change their votes.
It could easily be powerful enough as a hoax to change the nature of the election.
Now, what do you do about it if you get wounded by a hoax and you have the entire media complex is not going to debunk it?
What do you do? Unfortunately, you just deal with it.
It's a wound and it's a real one and it's not going to go away.
Now, the only way that this could go away Is if something remarkable happened, such as, let's say, all four people who were the sources came forward and said, no, no, we just made it up.
Now, that's not going to happen, but you can imagine some amazing scenario in which maybe it all blows up.
But assuming that it doesn't, because the fine people hoax is still alive and well, even though it's the most widely debunked hoax in American history, nothing is more debunked or more easily debunked Because you could just show the actual transcript or show the video.
And still, it completely works.
The reason the fine people hoax is so pervasive is that it works.
People do believe it, despite how easily it's debunked.
This one is just like that.
It's really deadly, and it happens to graft a little too well to the president's biggest unexploited weakness.
If you found out that suddenly, before the election, there was an artificial intelligence involved in a campaign, and suddenly also, at about that same time you found that out, you found that they had opened a new line of attack that was innovative, I would say this is an innovative attack, wouldn't you?
To go after the president's strength, because his strength is the military and law enforcement.
That's his strength. America, patriotism, Service.
So going after his strength is a non-obvious move.
Does a human come up with that?
I don't know. It has a whiff of artificial intelligence.
Because artificial intelligence could pick a target that a human just wouldn't have seen.
It would seem invisible to you to go after his strength.
But you're only looking to chop 2% off, remember?
You're not trying to change everybody's mind.
And so a good hoax that goes against his strength is a really solid play.
It's despicable.
It's unethical. It's immoral.
It's all those things. But it's really effective.
So the fact that they went after his strength kind of tells me that there's a little extra going on here.
Maybe they've identified that It's the lowest information voter.
Now, I don't want to say something that's insulting to our heroes in the service, but would you say that it might be true that They may be less into politics.
In other words, the younger you are, probably the less you're following things.
If you're in the military, you've got better things to do.
You're probably just following the surface stuff.
You're not really digging into the details.
So by identifying a group that is somewhat isolated from the news, if you can penetrate their isolation and get that rumor in there, nothing can get it out.
So the AI may have done two things.
It may have found an attack place, sort of like the Death Star.
You've all watched Star Wars.
You know that there's just one weakness in the Death Star.
It could be that the AI found that one weakness, figured out how to exploit it with a targeted hoax, but also may have found out that once you get the hoax in there, there's something about that It's also possible that because there's so much emotional content evolved with our service people,
especially families, that it's just something that people can't think rationally about.
It just has too much emotional content.
So what would you do if you were the Trump campaign and you were the recipients of this hoax and it worked?
You would, of course, do all your denials and the president's doing that.
But because people don't believe the president, especially if they're anti-Trump, it doesn't really help.
The denials are not going to make much difference at all.
And even the other people saying, I was with him every minute, it never happened.
Well, nobody's with anybody every minute.
So you could easily say, well, we don't know.
So here's the only thing you could do.
You have to come up with your own hoax that's just as bad.
The only defense to this is offense.
If Trump plays defense, he loses.
Trump on defense is not a good Trump.
Trump on offense?
Oh, that's a good Trump.
So Trump has to figure out how to go on offense.
And even if he were succeeding in just changing the focus of the news cycle, which we assume he will do, it's probably going to be an interesting day.
I'm sure President Trump will change the news cycle.
That alone isn't enough, because once that stain gets in there, it's just not coming out.
I mean, that hoax may have taken 2% right off of his polling numbers.
So I'm not going to recommend this.
I'm just telling you the only response that could work is an equally bad hoax about Biden that sticks.
Now, you would have to design your hoax as good as this one.
This is a really well-designed hoax because as ridiculous as it is and as obviously fake as it is, it's only obviously fake to the people who are smart enough to know that and they're not the ones they're trying to influence.
We are completely irrelevant.
All of us who know that it's a fake news story, we're not relevant.
Because nobody listens to us.
We're like the boy who cried wolf or something.
We can scream all day.
Nobody's going to listen. So if Trump could do the same thing, it would be devastating.
Now, if you were to design a hoax for Biden...
You would do the same process.
You would find something that had not yet been exploited, so it's fresh, you know, something that's new, something that has a great emotional content, and if you heard it, you could never be objective about him again.
So, and I think that's been tried before.
So accusations about, let's say, an accusation about Biden and an underage female.
Now, this didn't happen.
As far as I know, I'm not trying to start a rumor.
I'm giving you an example.
If you believe that Biden is a little touchy, and even his own supporters would admit that, if you agree that he sniffs a little bit too much hair, And I think even his supporters would say, yeah, there's a little hair sniffing we're not comfortable with.
So you start with something that people are biased to believe.
And then you add the thing that is purely ridiculous.
So a purely ridiculous thing might be, for example, that there was some underage girl that he did some bad thing with.
Now, it's one thing to hear that maybe something happened with a staffer, the Tara Reid thing, but still those are adults.
And as bad as that is, in the Me Too way, if you believe that it's true, it's still adults.
And that doesn't hit you the way anything would if a child was involved.
So that would be the response.
That would be unethical and immoral, but it would totally work, just as the losers and suckers hoax will work.
Here's a question for you.
How are we going to avoid a civil war?
How are we going to avoid a civil war?
What would it take to not have violence after the election?
Here are some things we can be sure of.
We can be sure that no matter what the result, people won't be happy.
Let's say if Trump loses narrowly, or just loses at all, would Trump supporters likely start a revolution?
Let's say they didn't even believe the vote.
They thought the vote was a little rigged.
Would Trump supporters go to the streets and cause a revolution, like a civil war?
And the answer is no.
No, I don't think they would.
Because they might take it to the Supreme Court.
They might want the legal system to be involved.
They might scream like crazy.
But they're not going to become Antifa.
They're not going to try to overthrow the country.
But what if it goes the other way?
If it goes the other way, will the Biden people, if they lose, narrowly or not narrowly, will they just go quietly?
No. No.
No, of course not. So the way it's shaping up is a Trump win followed by a civil war.
And that could last months or whatever.
Now, I don't know how much violence that means.
It could mean just civil unrest and more businesses getting burned, which would be plenty bad.
But certainly, we have a real dangerous situation.
What would it take to fix that?
We can actually see the fuse burning.
It's like you can see the pile of dynamite, and it's November 4th, let's say, day after the election, and then you can see the fuse, which goes all the way to today, and you can see the fuse is lit.
We're watching it in real time.
The fuse is actually lit.
What's going to stop it?
From turning into a civil war.
And so, I will take that as my task.
The only thing that would change it is a feat of persuasion that deactivated the bomb prior to the civil war.
Could there be such a strong bit of persuasion That you could actually, you know, completely snuff out a civil war?
Because that would be some pretty big persuasion.
And so, I don't know, but we'll see.
We'll give it a try.
So I'm going to make that my to-do, my personal task, to save the country and Not single-handedly, of course, but rather to think a little bit more productively about what it would take to change the mindset in America to productive.
What would it take?
Now, somebody says Kanye.
Yeah, Kanye, maybe he would be important for healing the country.
But I think that it's going to require something more than that.
Something that we haven't seen, something we haven't thought of yet.
And I will take that as my...
Oh, there is a story about Biden groping a Secret Service agent's girlfriend.
But again, that's a story about adults.
And as bad as it might be, if it were true, don't know if it is, as bad as that would be, still isn't as bad...
As this losers and suckers hoax against Trump.
Because that one really gets to your core.
Whereas accusations about adults, no matter how bad, you just say, it's a bad world, we wish it didn't happen.
You just have a different feeling about it.
Alright, switch off the internet.
I believe that there is...
A way to go here.
The ideal way to go would be for the black voters to realize that they've been had.
The Antifa is not on their side.
And I don't think that's far away.
If you could convince black voters, and when I say convince, I don't mean lie to them.
I mean, it's fairly obvious.
So what I'm talking about is actually observably true, that Antifa is not on the side of black Americans.
Black Americans, for the most part, would like prosperity and jobs and education, safety, the ability to not be afraid of police.
They'd like a lot of stuff that Republicans want to give them.
Republicans want to give them the things they want.
Antifa wants to take it all away.
Wants to take it away from rich white people.
Wants to take it away from poor black people.
Wants to take everything away.
And if you can make the case that Antifa is the enemy of black America and that the Black Lives Matter movement is just a corrupt thing that's working against the interests of black voters, that could be something.
And if you look at the support numbers from African Americans for President Trump, you can see that a lot of black voters have, let's say, emerged from the fog of fake news and said to themselves some version of, wait a minute, why would I believe these guys?
Let me just put it in the form of a question.
Just imagine you're a black American voter, you've been involved with the protests, and you suddenly have this thought about Antifa.
Why would I believe those guys?
What is it about those guys that would make me believe that they have my best interest?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
In fact, literally everything about Antifa says that they're going to screw you next.
Because that's their whole deal.
Their deal is not to create a society where everybody's doing well.
They're literally looking to rip everything apart.
And that means your stuff too.
So black Americans, you would lose your stuff and you would lose it fast under your own partner's, Antifa's preference.
All right. I'm looking at your comments.
And BLM the same as Marxists.
Yeah. And let me work on fixing this whole protest thing.
And I'll get back to you with some ideas on that.
What if he croaks after winning?
Somebody's saying to Biden. Well, he will die after winning.
We just don't know how long it'll take.
Stop the money.
Yeah, you know, if you've been watching the internet, you know that there's some thought that the guy who killed the guy in Portland, that things look a little more organized than you would expect, meaning that there may be either some foreign or domestic military-style organization involved with the Antifa stuff.
I'm not sure I'm buying that completely.
But there's enough evidence and there are enough indications that I'd say it's a 65% chance that the Antifa, BLM stuff is not American organic.
So I don't think it's an organic movement.
We just don't know who's pulling the strings.
The president mentioned shadowy groups and then The press tried to make him look like a kook for saying that, but the truth is I don't think anybody knows.
It's just obvious that there's some kind of organization behind the scenes, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we don't see the leaders.
The fact that we don't see the leaders of these groups and that they don't have a leadership structure suggests that the real leaders are hidden.
And why would the real leaders be hidden?
Well, the obvious explanation is They're not on our side, if you know what I mean.
All right. High odds he gets COVID soon.
Somebody's talking about it. Well, the slaughter meter, because of this latest hoax, which is a good one, I'd say that sets the slaughter meter back to, I'd say, 50%.
So, and of course, this won't last.
You know, there will be 50 more outrages between now and Election Day.
But the slaughter meter only is a snapshot in time that if things went the way they're going now, in other words, if people believe this losers and suckers hoax, that would take probably Trump's chances down by 50%.
It's that strong.
It's as strong as the fine people hoax.
And the fine people hoax is the only reason Trump doesn't have a massive lead in just the polls.
It's the only reason. Because as I've told you before, there are lots of complaints about Trump, but if you took away the fine people hoax, all of the other ones are only sort of speculative.
It's like, well, I think he was thinking this when he said that, or I think he had a bad feeling when he suggested this.
The fine people hoax is the only one where people say, I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears, even though they didn't.
They were hoaxed by a fake edit.
Somebody says, now finally we're talking treason and the death penalty.
Yeah, there is something going on that looks like professionals at work trying to overthrow the country.
We just don't know exactly who's behind all that.
I don't even know if they're Americans.
Trump offers VP to Biden?
What? That's the worst idea I've heard today.
What will the October surprise be?
You know, it's almost like we're running out of surprises, aren't we?
Oh yeah, and then Biden shook hands when he got off the plane against all recommendations.
