Episode 1114 Scott Adams: Bad Twitter Takes, Anonymous Fakes, The Atlantic Treason Article, BLMKKK
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Content:
BLM is a racist group
The Worst Takes on Twitter
"Losers and suckers" HOAX
Hit piece on First Lady, Melania Trump
Hit piece on President Trump in The Atlantic
Christopher Rufo's success, divisive, un-American training halted
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Yeah, you might have some other highlights coming up.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. I can feel Trump's approval level climbing by 1%.
Yes, according to Rasmussen, he's up to 52% approval.
Now, if the 52% holds and it turns out that that's accurate, that's pretty much the end of the game.
Because at that level, you pretty much always get re-elected.
But we'll see if that holds.
Lots of plenty. There's plenty of time for excitement between now and Election Day.
Well, the Biden riots continue in Rochester, Portland, and New York City.
I've been trying to figure out what's the best way to characterize them, and I think Biden riots would be the best way.
They do have a variety of things that the protesters and the rioters and the looters have different motivations.
But the one thing they all have in common is that they support Joe Biden.
It's the only thing they have in common.
So I think it's fair to call them Biden riots.
I've decided that I'm not going to make a distinction anymore between Black Lives Matter and the KKK. Now, you might say to me, Scott, those are literally opposites.
And I would say, not really.
Not really.
Because both groups are expressly racist.
That's why they exist.
They're... Yeah, they're both racist groups.
As soon as you identify as a racist organization, I don't really need to hear the details.
I'm kind of out on that.
Here's what I don't do.
Scott, here's a racist organization.
Why don't you stay a while and listen to some of the details?
Because I know it sounds bad on the surface that it's a racist organization, but And maybe they're involved in some protests that turn into a little bit of looting and rioting, but that's a small percentage of them.
I think you should stay and hear the full explanation of what you're doing.
No. No, I don't stay for the meeting.
I say, wait, what was that first thing you said?
And they say, oh, we're a racist organization.
Come and stay and listen to the details.
No, I feel like I don't need to stay for the details because whether you're Black Lives Matter or if you're the KKK, I'm still kind of out on the first sentence.
It's like, yeah, we're a racist organization.
I'm out. I'm out.
But wait, you haven't heard our reasons.
I'm not going to stay for that.
So, those of you who would like to discuss the fine differences between one racist organization and another, you're welcome to do that.
Just don't invite me.
I don't need to be part of that conversation.
But if any of those people would like to be on Team United States and try to make the best world for everybody as best we can under realistic constraints, I'm okay with that.
But for now, My current take is that BLM and the KKK are different.
Yeah, I get that.
They're different. But they're different in the way that Uber and Lyft are different.
Sure, it's a different app.
It's a different organization.
There's a lot of differences between Uber and Lyft.
But what's not different is that I don't care.
They're the same to me.
I get that they're different to them.
I get that Uber knows it's not Lyft, and Lyft knows it's not Uber, but it doesn't matter to me.
Those things are irrelevant to me.
So here's my new segment I call Worst Takes on Twitter.
And these are the ones that are so bad, you don't necessarily have to have any discussion about them.
You could just put them out there, and they could just sit there as Worst Takes.
So here's one. It doesn't even matter who said some of these things, so sometimes I'll tell you who did, and sometimes I won't.
Somebody says, nobody states anything bad about the KKK. So this is somebody who was pro-Black Lives Matter, and he was noting that there's a hashtag called BLM terrorists, and And this gentleman says,
you know, hashtag BLM terrorists, but nobody says anything bad about the KKK. To which I say, I think a lot of people say bad things about the KKK. I haven't done a research project on it.
I can't say that I've done a randomized control study.
But observationally, back me up in the comments here, I feel as though I've heard bad things about the KKK. Where have you lived in the United States where you're not hearing bad things about the KKK? So that's a worse take.
This is also from Twitter.
So a professor at NYU, Salvatore Felica, he tweeted about the Rochester protests and said, quote, How much you want to bet these are not BLM people, that they're right-wing operatives trying to scare suburban folks?
I'll take that bet. Does anybody else want to get in on this?
There's somebody who's smart enough to be a professor and smart enough to be teaching college students at NYU. So he's smart enough to do that, but he's willing to take a bet that the people presenting themselves as Black Lives Matter are really right-wing operatives.
I'm going to take that bet.
How much do you want to put on that?
Now, I'm not going to say that it has never happened that some right-wing operative dressed up as Antifa or Black Lives Matter.
It's a big world.
It's probably happened.
But no, not most of them.
I think the vast majority of them are actually exactly what they look like.
Protesters. Here's one from Carnell Blackwell.
And because this is a simulation, and only because it's a simulation, this has nothing to do with race, it's just a coincidence that Cornell Blackwell is a black man.
I always think it's interesting when people's names suggest what they do for life or how they're identified.
But he's...
Mr. Blackwell says...
He was talking about the video of...
A restaurant, an outdoor restaurant, where the alleged Black Lives Matter protesters were going through the restaurant kind of chasing people out and pushing over the tables.
And Carnell Blackwell says in his tweet, there's actually not one black person going through that restaurant disturbing those people.
Like that those are all white people who are trying to put a bad light on BLM. I wonder who hired them.
Now, the first problem with this Is that I saw the video.
There were black people with the white people.
So, first of all, what's wrong with your eyesight?
But secondly, do you think that's what that was?
Do you think it was a false flag?
And it was a bunch of white people pretending to be Black Lives Matter turning over tables in a restaurant?
I suppose anything's possible.
But I'm going to say this isn't the strongest take.
I'm guessing that's not what was happening there.
And here's one of my favorites.
This is from Christine Morris on Twitter.
And Christine says, I am white.
I am also a race scholar.
Okay, so here's somebody who's a race scholar, so this should be a good take, right?
She goes on. I do not understand how any reasonable, rational, intelligent person can look at our system and And say it is not built to keep white people in power.
The only way to miss it is to refuse to look.
And I tweeted back that all systems are designed to keep the people who are in power in power.
There's no exception to that.
What is a system that is not designed to keep the people who have power in power?
That's never existed.
The fact that the white people are in power It's an artifact of history.
It just worked out that way.
But it doesn't matter who's in power.
Whoever is in power is going to make damn sure the system keeps them in power.
That's all that's happening.
The fact that that also has a racial component is sort of the outcome of it.
But it wouldn't matter if all of our leaders magically became Filipino Americans.
They would still design the system to keep the system with the powerful people powerful.
And it would have the effect of probably keeping more people like them in power.
But you have to kind of take that extra leap to imagine that the reason that's being done is racial.
You don't need the racial reason, because you have the other reason, which is everybody in power wants to stay there.
There's no exception to that.
If tomorrow things got turned upside down and black Americans were in power, they would make sure the system maintained that situation.
Why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they?
Everybody would. It's just the most common thing in the world.
Well, anyway, now that we're seeing lots of speculation from black people who support Black Lives Matter, speculating that the white people who are helping them, let's say Antifa, maybe are not helping them after all.
Maybe the white people who are allegedly on their side are making things worse, as in much, much worse.
Now, speaking for The team that is the target of persuasion, let's say white people who have some money, wouldn't you say?
That the group that is mostly trying to be persuaded by the protests would be the people in power, and mostly white people in power.
I think that's a fair statement.
It's an overgeneralization, of course.
There are other people in power.
But in terms of the social construct of these protests, that's kind of what it is.
And doesn't it seem to you that Black Lives Matter and those white people who are helping them Are going to be at each other's throats fairly soon?
I think fairly soon, the black people who had completely legitimate complaints, just to refresh if anybody's new to this, I'm completely on the side that says that systemic racism exists.
And I'm completely on the side that says, hey, let's see what we can do about that.
There must be a variety of things we can do to minimize that, which is different than destroying the entire system and turning it upside down.
For example, you could put a lot of attention.
Black Americans and Republicans of all type could concentrate on defeating the teachers' unions, because the teachers' unions are the ones that prevent competition in schools, which makes Which makes an ossified situation.
In other words, because the school system can't allow people easily to rise from whatever situation they were born into, that's the problem.
So if you're looking for the biggest problem, you have all the allies in the world.
Tons of allies.
Democrats, not enough of them.
Republicans, almost all of them.
Black population, most of them.
Should be on exactly the same side on the major point of systemic racism, which is the teachers' unions.
Why not just acknowledge that and then work on it?
Get it done. So anybody who's not working on such an obvious big target and instead is working on the smallest priority, which is the total number of people who get killed by the police, tragic as it is, As much as we should fix that, it's also the smallest problem, just in terms of numbers.
The school system destroys an entire generation.
Violence from police, as bad as it is, doesn't come anywhere near that.
It doesn't destroy a generation.
So I think there's almost certainly going to be a big battle between Black Lives Matter activists who are actually black, And Black Lives Matter helpers who are white who are not helping.
Those two groups are going to come to blows.
There's a story in the news about Melania.
And I had to go do some research to find out what's up with this.
And the idea is that Melania, the critics say, that she's no better than Trump because she supported the birther racist idea.
Sometime back, she was pro-birtherism, I guess.
Now, I thought, I wonder what she actually said.
Because in the world of fake news, you say to yourself, that is exactly the kind of story...
That might be taken out of context or changed somehow.
So I looked it up. And it sounds like the worst thing she did was go on The View, and she said something along the lines of that the birth certificate for Obama, everybody would like to see the real one, and they weren't sure they had seen the real birth certificate yet.
Now, does that sound racist?
Does it sound racist?
That you think the entire country would be interested in making sure that the birth certificate is exactly what you hope it would be, which is legal and appropriate.
That just sounds like what everybody wanted.
There were no Democrats who didn't want that, because they assumed that if they had the full birth certificate, it would show that they're right.
So of course Democrats wanted that.
Republicans wanted it because they thought, well, maybe there's something here.
But they wanted the same thing.
They wanted to know. So Melania basically characterized accurately the opinion of every Democrat and every Republican and everyone in the media.
That's literally all she did.
She just characterized everybody's opinion that they'd like to know for sure and move on with life.
And that turned into, she must be a racist because...
And this is how it was worded in one piece on her.
Many see birtherism as racist due to the fact that no other U.S. president was ever questioned about his birthplace until Obama, the first black president.
So therefore, it is a direct attack on his legitimacy.
To which I say, who was the other president who you could have made this attack on?
Who was the other president who had any kind of unknown about their birth certificate?
This is completely stupid thinking.
You would have to be a moron to go from, hey, Obama is the only one who is black and president, and also the only one who was asked about his birth certificate, therefore, it's obviously racist.
Couldn't you make this same statement about literally every complaint about Obama?
Could you now say, you know, the only person that we ever say that he promised you could keep your doctor and then he didn't, of all the presidents, look at him, how many white presidents were ever criticized, even once, for saying you could keep your doctor and And then it turns out you couldn't.
Just one, right?
All these white presidents, and the only one, the only one who gets picked on for saying that you could keep your doctor when you couldn't is the black one?
You're telling me that's not racist?
Do the math.
One out of 45, or whatever, I guess you have to count the two terms, etc., So, one out of whatever.
That's a pretty big coincidence, Scott.
Isn't that proof?
No, it's not proof of anything.
The only thing it's proof of is that Obama had a certain set of things he could be attacked on, and he was attacked on every one of them.
That's it. That's the whole story.
Everything that he could be attacked on, he was attacked on.
What about all the other presidents?
Is it true that everything they could be attacked on, they were attacked on?
Yes! Every single thing.
In fact, Ted Cruz was attacked on his potential citizenship because of some Canadian connection.
Obviously that wasn't racist, unless it was racist against quasi-Canadians.
So, I would say that the people who say the birther thing is obviously racist, just on the surface it's obvious, that's just stupid.
I don't even think that's political.
I think it's just stupid, because that's not how thinking works.
Thinking does not take every coincidence and put meaning to it.
That's not thinking.
That's the opposite. That's just some kind of bad pattern recognition, that is.
President Trump's approval rating, like I said, is up to 52%, but apparently his, according to Rasmussen anyway, his approval among black likely voters is historic.
Now, we don't know if that translates into Election Day, because there's so many unknowns, but there is a very, very high likelihood, I would say, that President Trump will be re-elected with a A percentage of the black vote that nobody saw coming.
Because the press is no longer a legitimate reporter of fact.
It is just a propaganda outfit.
It's looking like it.
I'm not sure if you can say it's going to happen yet, but the indications are he'll have the biggest black support of any president.
Let's talk about that Atlantic article.
Probably in 24 hours it won't even be news anymore.
But did you all know that the Atlantic, the disreputable publication that has no credibility whatsoever, basically a propaganda rag, that it's owned by Steve Jobs' widow?
Or she's the biggest shareholder, I guess.
So Lorena Jobs.
Do you know what's also a big coincidence about Lorena Jobs?
In addition to owning the biggest chunk of the Atlantic, she's also Joe Biden's biggest donor.
Well, there's a big coincidence.
So, the completely disreputable publication, which is well understood to be just a propaganda rag, which is run by Jeffrey Goldberg...
Other people who seem to know this stuff consider him almost an emblem of unreliable journalists.
He's almost, not almost, within journalism, he's actually famous for making up stories.
He's literally, you know, his name is almost synonymous with fake news.
So you've got a propaganda rag that's majority owned by Biden's biggest donor, And an article written by the least credible journalist in all of America.
And that's what we're talking about.
So then, but you say to yourself, but Scott, the big news is that Jennifer Griffin of Fox News has confirmed it.
Well, what does confirmed mean?
So it turns out that there's a lot of mocking coming out about the word confirmed.
So here's what happened.
So when Jennifer Griffin looked into it, she found that Bolton, John Bolton, and at least one other, who were present the whole time these decisions were being made, you know, the subject of the Atlantic story, says no, that it was not true, and he's definitely sure of it, and he doesn't like Trump, but he's just being honest.
It did not happen that Trump wanted to cancel for any reason other than weather, the event that got canceled for Trump.
And so the only thing that could be confirmed by another person was debunked.
The parts that were considered confirmed were just talking to the same anonymous sources and they just repeated their story, we think, because Jennifer Griffin did not mention that she talked to other people.
So the assumption is she talked to the same sources.
In the reporting business, That's called not confirmed.
That is the definition of a story that you have not confirmed is one in which there are several claims.
You've debunked the ones that can be debunked and all you've done is talk to the same anonymous sources that stayed anonymous.
That is closer to debunking a story.
And it's actually been labeled as confirming.
It's a debunk Because once you've debunked any part of a story conclusively, then you sort of debunk the rest of the story because it is presented as a package.
And if any part of the package can be easily proven to be false, well then the rest of the package, especially if it's anonymous sources, has to be rejected.
The news and much of social media called that debunking a confirmation of the story.
Incredible. A confirmation of the story.
And we're at that point in history where somebody can show you a banana and say, it's an apple.
And you'll say, um, no, I'm looking right in your hand and that's a banana.
And people will look right at you and say, apple.
Now what's wrong with you?
Is there something wrong with your brain?
Because that's clearly a banana.
It's this long.
You can peel it. It's yellow.
I can ask a hundred people.
You can take a picture.
You can Google it. Every way you can check this, that's a banana.
And the person will look at you and say, it's an apple.
And you say, I don't know where to go with this.
I just don't know where to go with this.
It's literally, we've got to the point...
Where people will look you right in the eye and tell you that there's an elephant standing in the room when there isn't.
That's sort of where we're at now.
But let me talk about some of the specific claims.
In the Jennifer Griffin debunk, which she calls, or others call, her confirmation.
So she said two sources confirmed the president did not want flags lowered.
Confirmed? No, that's the opposite of confirmed, unless she's telling us these are new people she talked to.
But she didn't say that, so it's the opposite of confirmed.
And that the White House ordered them a half-mast, there was a standoff, and then the president relented.
Here's another way to tell that same story.
Advisors wanted the flag to be at half-staff for...
Who was this?
What's his name's... Why am I blanking out on John McCain's death?
So there were some people who wanted it to be half-mast.
They're reporting that the president didn't, but the people who wanted it to be half-mast prevailed.
Let me tell you the other way to tell this story.
President Trump listened to the arguments and decided to fly the flags at half-mast.
That's the same story.
Yeah, thank you, McCain.
It's the same story, it's just worded differently.
All I did was put different words that are completely accurate on the same set of facts.
Do you know how decisions are made?
Like this. Every decision is made this way.
There's a pro, there's a con.
The boss makes the decision.
That's it. It doesn't make the con arguments go away.
It doesn't make the pro arguments right.
It's just how everything works.
People argue the decision is made.
So when President Trump says it was his decision to lower the flags to half-mast, that is literally, technically, 100% accurate.
It might also be that there was a conversation about it.
It might also be that he wasn't immediately on that page.
Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
It only matters what he decided.
He was in charge and he decided to do this.
And then he said, I'm the one who decided to do it.
That's the end of the story.
If you're digging into what the argument was, why?
There's an argument on everything.
He made the decision.
Everybody agreed with the decision.
It's over. So that was one.
And by the way, that was only about McCain.
It was not about service people.
Then Griffin also said she confirmed that Trump had asked why veterans served.
And the quote attributed to Trump is, what's in it for them?
They don't make any money.
Now, how do you interpret that?
If Trump did say this, and of course none of this is credible, but if he did say it, If he was looking at a cemetery of dead service people, and if he said, what's in it for them, they don't make money, how do you interpret that?
I, not being batshit crazy, interpret it the most obvious way, which is that they're heroes.
They're heroes because they did it for selfless reasons, which is exactly what Trump is getting at, or that's the way I interpret the sentence, When he says what's in it for them, he's noting explicitly that there's not selfish gain involved.
And he says they don't make money.
Again, there's no selfish gain involved.
That's what a hero is.
Somebody who put their life on the line without financial gain for other people.
This is nothing but a compliment.
It's nothing but a compliment.
And it's reported as some kind of an insult.
How about the next one? But Griffin said she could not confirm, quote, the most salacious part.
So the salacious part was that Trump had called the World War I soldiers buried at the Ein Marne American Cemetery near Paris, losers and suckers.
Do you know why nobody could confirm that?
Because there's no chance that that happened.
There is zero chance That the President of the United States, President Donald Trump, ever stood at a World War I cemetery in someone else's country with Americans apparently in the cemetery.
Are there Americans there?
Well, whoever is there, they were on our side, so it doesn't make much difference.
There is no chance that he called them losers and suckers.
It is so completely opposite of his personality.
Now, you say to me, but Scott, he said terrible things about people.
Yes! Terrible people who are his critics.
He doesn't have any critics buried in the cemetery.
There are no critics in the cemetery.
They're not complaining about anything, unfortunately.
So, To imagine that because Trump says bad things about his critics, that he would also say something about the people he admires and supports the most, law enforcement, first responders, the military. He's really, really consistent about this.
I mean, if there's one thing he's crystal clear about is his respect for people in the service.
He's always been clear about that.
Regarding the July 4th military parade, when somebody said about the inclusion of wounded soldiers, Trump is reported to have said that's not a good look.
Americans don't like that.
Here's the problem.
That's just true.
I hate to say it, but if you were going to a military parade, The point of which is to make you feel good about the country.
The wounded soldiers, although we should give them the highest level of respect, I think most Americans do.
I think we get that right.
That the highest level of respect we give to our wounded and certainly the soldiers who passed away.
But that said, that doesn't mean you use every group and every purpose all the time.
You don't use them for every purpose because they're the most respected.
A military parade is really about the look and the feel.
And if you put the people who had a tragic, let's say a permanent disability or something, from war, what are you telling the spectators?
What are you telling the country?
Well, one thing you're telling them is that you're respecting that group.
A+. That part's good.
But you're also trying to sell the military.
And it's not the way you sell it.
Have you ever seen a recruiting commercial on television for the Marines, let's say, which showed a wounded soldier?
Have you ever seen that?
Do you think that the people who make commercials that are intended to recruit people and make our volunteer army work Voluntary military work.
Do you think that the Madison Avenue commercial people don't think exactly like Trump does, which is, no, we're trying to make this look like people want to get involved.
If you show the wounded, no matter how much respect you give them, and they deserve every bit of it, it does detract from the message.
Now, here's my big complaint here.
That is the sort of thing that you could say privately and nobody would get too offended, right?
If you said the same thing I just said, if you were dumb enough to say it in public, good luck.
I'll be cancelled by tomorrow.
But if you had said something like that privately, let's say it was you and whoever was working on the event, would that be a problem?
Two people, private conversation, would that be a problem?
No. No, that wouldn't be even disrespectful because it would be two people trying to solve a problem.
How do you communicate this thing?
How do you sell the military? And they would not be even a little bit disrespecting any wounded service people.
They would just be saying, what's the time and the place?
How do you arrange things for the best result?
The problem came when it was reported.
So in other words, whoever told the story Took it out of a private conversation where it was not disrespectful and could not have hurt anybody because it was in a private conversation.
And they made it a public statement which now opens up the question of whether it was disrespectful.
And so, you see the Democrats once again throwing under the bus some part of the American public to make a political point.
In this case, surfacing this is the most distasteful thing you might ever see.
And so the reporters, you know, the Jeffrey Goldbergs, the Atlantic, and even the people who told them the story, You would have to put them at the lowest level of reputable Americans.
I'd put the wounded soldiers at the top.
You know, if you're just going to rank people for how much have they given to the country, what is their value to society, wounded service people at the top, people who told that frickin' story in public to even bring into the conversation disrespect for the wounded soldiers...
Whoever told that story and made that public for political reasons?
Most disgusting people on earth.
Horrible. Yet, we're also trained and brainwashed to look at the players instead of the messengers.
Sometimes the messenger is the problem.
This is a clean case where the messenger was the problem, not the message.
Because the message was, you know, in its...
All right.
Then the question about whether he went, why he didn't go to the cemetery, that was all debunked.
All right, here's Chris Saliza at CNN. Now, CNN is covering this in a very interesting way.
I would say that CNN's coverage signals that they don't believe it's true.
Because when CNN reports it as, this is not confirmed, or actually, I think what Saliza said was that CNN has not confirmed this story.
Now, you know how much CNN wants to confirm this story.
And you know that they will do reckless things if it's bad for Trump.
So they'll take the thinnest story and make it real through their reporting routinely.
And even CNN is still careful with their language and says, CNN has not confirmed the story.
But, despite that, Chris Eliza makes a valiant attempt to make the point That this story, whether it's true or false, the Atlantic story, whether it's true or false, it's still in the family of things that Trump has done that have similar vibes of badness, and he's going to list them all so that you can see even if this story isn't true in the Atlantic, it's true.
True-ish, in the sense that it sort of acts as a proxy for all the things he has done, that we know he's done.
So let's look at this list, this powerful list of things we know that the president has done.
He once made a joke about John McCain not being a war hero because he was captured.
He says, I like people who weren't captured.
Literally a joke.
A Chris Rock joke before it was a Trump joke.
Literally a well-known joke.
I recognized it immediately.
I recognized the form of the joke as soon as I heard it.
Oh, it's one of those jokes.
Because there are only a hundred jokes in the universe, and everybody just populates them with different variables, but it's the same joke.
The moment I heard this, I was like, oh, it's that one.
It's that type of joke.
Where you take somebody who's the highest level of respect, a war hero, And you just find a clever way to redefine them into the lowest level of respect, which is, he's just a guy who got captured.
Now, is this disrespectful of military people, or is it clearly just a joke about somebody he's running for president against?
Well, it's clearly just a joke, and it's somebody who's his critic, and it's obviously just designed about this one person.
If you try to generalize this, a joke, to other captured service people, do you imagine for one minute, do you imagine in your wildest imagination that Trump would have extended this thought to anybody else?
If you said to Trump, okay, you said that about McCain, but would you say that about All the other captured service people.
What would Trump say?
Do you think he would say, oh yeah, that's just generally true?
No. No.
Not only would he not say it, there isn't the slightest chance he thinks it.
Because, obviously, people get drafted, it's not their choice.
Things happen, people get captured, it's not their fault.
Obviously, Trump knows that.
Because everybody knows that.
So to imagine that his one jokey attack on a political opponent was somehow his opinion about service people, that's just dumb.
To extend that as an indication of his attitude about other service people, that's just dumb.
There's no other way to express it.
I'd love to say, you know, the facts are wrong, but no, that's just dumb.
It's obviously just about one person.
Here's another one from Chris Silliza.
In the wake of the Gold Star Father Kayser Khan's speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, in which Khan suggested Trump had never sacrificed anything in life, the billionaire businessman suggested that Hillary Clinton's speechwriters had actually written the speech.
Oh my goodness!
How disrespectful to a gold star family to suggest that the most obvious thing that's clearly true is obviously clearly true.
It is obviously clearly true that if you're going to give a speech at the Democratic or Republican convention, that people associated with organizing the convention will need to hear what your speech is.
They will have input.
It's just normal.
So, so far the president has accused them of just being normal people doing the normal thing you do if you're going to be a keynote at an event like that.
So, so far it's nothing.
But he goes on and he wondered aloud about Khan's wife who stood silently by her husband but was not allowed to speak and Trump said not allowed to speak.
Now, is that Insulting service people?
What does that have to do with the military?
Talking about this man's relationship with his wife was obviously pointing out that he was not treating his wife well.
That's fair. For Trump to point out, why doesn't the woman get to speak?
That is progressive.
So he's being blamed for being anti-military, for literally speaking in favor of a gold star mother's respect for being able to speak.
Not allowed to speak in public?
That's kind of disrespectful, isn't it?
Make her stand there and not speak?
I'm not sure that shows her respect.
So Trump calling out for more respect For a Gold Star family mother has been turned into Trump being anti-military.
This is not even close.
They're not even in the same conversation.
So now you've got these two ridiculous laundry list examples that don't have anything to do with the military.
Then there was last fall, so as it goes on, Trump referred to James Mattis, his former Secretary of Defense, A highly decorated Marine, he called him the world's most overrated general.
Now, isn't that just Trump insulting a critic?
There's nothing to that.
It has nothing to do with the military.
It has everything to do with one guy.
You can insult one guy who insulted you first, especially if you've already fired him.
I mean, this is the most basic stuff.
How does this have to do with the military?
It has to do with this one guy that he doesn't like.
And then, then there's, so Liz goes on, while campaigning in Iowa in 2015, Trump said, I know more about ISIS than the generals do.
Isn't that just Trump being Trump?
In what world is that an insult to the military?
If anything, it's an insult to his own generals, and they're well-paid.
I don't think that they figure that's the biggest problem in their life.
I think it's just Trump being Trump.
It has nothing to do with respecting the military.
Anyway, and then the funniest part is that SELISA ends it up...
These are his strongest examples, and all of them are empty.
They're completely empty vessels.
There's nothing in them, any of them.
And then he rounds it out with this.
There's more. Much more.
And then there's a link to something I didn't bother clicking.
But you get the idea.
Yeah, I get the idea. I get the idea that you don't have a damn thing.
There's nothing here.
All right. I noticed that Clay Travis was tweeting that the Washington Post wrote a 2300-word hit piece on him.
And took all of his quotes out of context, etc.
And he mentioned that he expected it to happen, which is why he recorded the interview so you can see all the despicable things they did.
Now, remember I've told you about the Murray-Gell-Man amnesia effect.
So if you are the subject of news stories, you get to see firsthand how they've distorted everything.
But then you read about somebody else's story and you think, well, that's probably true.
No, no.
It's almost never true.
And until you learn that profile stories are almost never true, in terms of accurate and all their points, it's hard to believe until you see enough examples of it.
But here's my advice to you, if anybody needs to hear this.
In the political season, Do not agree to a profile piece no matter how complimentary that feels.
I fell for that with Bloomberg.
So Bloomberg did one of those things back in the last election cycle where they have a reporter who follows you around half a day and asks lots of questions and really tries to dig in and do a profile of you.
Don't do those. Those are nothing but hit pieces in which they build up your ego.
It's like, hey, Clay, you are so important now.
You're doing great, Clay.
The Washington Post, a highly prestigious publication, we'd like to do a nice profile piece of you.
Now, Clay Travis was, as you can tell from the story, smart enough to know that it was a trap.
So he set his own trap to trap the trappers, but I don't think it worked, because the people who read the Washington Post are going to believe what they read, and not as many people are going to read his debunk.
So the Washington Post still won.
His trapping of the trap is good, but not as good as if he had not done it at all.
So if you get an opportunity to do a profile piece with one of these big publications, During a political season, the only purpose is to take you off the board.
And that the next time you say something clever against Biden, then all the people who have seen that article, the hippies, can say, oh, well, here's the guy who eats babies, you know, some lie that they'd make up in the hippies.
Here's the link to it so you can see I'm not making it up.
Here's an article that says he eats babies.
And now he says Joe Biden looks sleepy.
Oh, I guess we can't believe this guy because this profile piece says he eats babies.
So don't do a profile piece.
It's a trap. So because the media can cause trouble and then blame somebody else for it, it's an amazing power, that you can be the source of the problem...
And then you can completely frame somebody else for it because you have the power of owning the airwaves.
And here are the times they've done this.
So with the fine people hoax, they basically threw black America onto the bus, in my opinion.
This was essentially a scam on black Americans.
Because the idea was for white people who pretend to be helping to tell black people that The President of the United States complimented white supremacists.
Imagine you're a black American.
Some of you are, so you don't have to imagine it.
Imagine you're a black American and you hear credible news organizations or ones you think should be credible.
Turns out they're not credible, but you think they are because somebody's got to be credible.
And they tell you that the President of the United States just sided with people who would like you gone.
How would that feel?
You're just a black American citizen.
You're working, taking care of your family.
You're contributing. Maybe you've been in the military.
You've done some stuff.
You've contributed. You know, you have the right to every bit of respect and good treatment as every American, of course.
That's the bedrock of our system.
And then the frickin' Democrats run this hoax in which they convince you With this scam, because the fine people hoax, as you know, didn't really happen.
They edit the thing to take out the clarifier that says when the president said he's condemning the white nationalists and neo-Nazis, they leave that out if you don't know how the scam was done.
So isn't that just about the worst thing you've ever heard anybody to do to citizens of this country?
To actually convince them that they're living...
In a country where the leader was pro-white supremacist.
He's not. Didn't happen.
But that's like one of the worst cons I've ever seen, and they sold it to most of the country.
That is despicable.
Is it as despicable as this latest one where they are throwing the Gold Star families and the service people under the bus?
Because with this con, or scam if you will, They've decided that they will convince the people who are giving the most, literally sacrificing life and limb for this country, they're telling that group that their leader doesn't respect them.
Now, it's not true.
It's the opposite of true.
But how would you feel if you'd given your legs Or you had somebody in your family who died fighting for this country and then you hear this scam that says that the leader doesn't even respect you.
Not true. Completely false.
But that is a bad thing to do to the people we should be respecting the most.
That's as low as you can get.
So the Democrats seem to consistently be willing to do hoaxes That would target black Americans really badly.
I mean, it's hard to think of anything that would be worse than that.
And target service people?
I mean, this is disgusting.
Disgusting stuff that they're doing.
All right. I, of course, was waiting when I heard the Atlantic story hoax.
I was waiting for my smart liberal friend that I talk about all the time.
So he's my friend that I argue with, usually by email.
And he has one characteristic which makes him fun to talk with.
He believes everything in the news.
He actually just believes it uncritically.
And it creates hilarious results.
Because I take his side...
But I'm certainly, you've heard me how many times, criticize Fox News for various craziness.
Criticize the left, I criticize the right, I've criticized the president.
So I'm pretty willing to criticize anything.
And I'll call BS, whether it comes from the left or the right.
I never bought into the Bertha thing, for example.
There was never one moment that I thought the Bertha thing was true.
There was never one moment I thought the Uranium One thing was true.
Those are complete bullshit stuff.
So I call out the hoaxes everywhere.
Doesn't matter where they come from.
If it's not true, obviously not true, I'm going to call it out.
But my liberal friend only thinks that CNN is right and only thinks that the people on the right are wrong, and there's no exception.
And he's sort of stuck in the past where the news was somewhat believable.
Maybe it wasn't true, but at least we believed it back then.
And of course, he bought every part of the Atlantic story.
And I thought to myself, surely, surely he's not going to believe this one.
Because this one is so obviously...
I mean, this one, they're not even really trying too hard.
This is just so obviously a hoax.
And sure enough, I checked my email, and there it is.
He believed every part of it.
Every part of it he believed.
It's... Quite a head shaker.
Alright. We're all laughing about the press conference that Biden did yesterday, in which he was reading off the teleprompter and read the part you're not supposed to read.
End of quote. Because it just says that on the teleprompter.
Maybe he was supposed to say it, I don't know.
But it looked funny. And, of course, he looked degraded and he looked in bad shape, but they gave him these little softball questions.
Most of his questions were of this form.
How do you feel about the badness of Donald Trump?
Or what should we think about how dumb Donald Trump is?
So that's the kind of questions he got.
All right. So Christopher Rufo, R-U-F-O, has quite a big win to his credit.
So on Tuesday, the president called to, no, he called on the president to abolish critical race theory, the training courses on that, in the federal government.
And last night, that became the standard.
So it wasn't the president himself who did it, but somebody who had that authority in the government has decided that that training will no longer be allowed in the government.
Now here's what's interesting.
They give the reasons in their official letter and called it divisive and un-American.
The training, that is.
The critical race training.
And here's how they explained it.
One paragraph said, in the meantime, all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on critical race theory, white privilege, or any other training or propaganda effort, they actually called it propaganda effort, that teaches or suggests either one, that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country, or two, That any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.
Now, that's a pretty strong statement from the government.
Now, here's what's interesting.
Once your government has said something is un-American, how do the colleges continue teaching it?
Think about that.
If you're a college or a private business and you wanted to keep doing this Kind of training.
You would have to do it knowing that the government of the United States has stated that it's, they don't say unconstitutional, but sort of is, in the spirit of the Constitution anyway.
It's unconstitutional.
And that it's inherently, that it's just bad.
It's un-American. Will they still do it when the government has labeled it as un-American?
I think they will, but they're going to get more pushback.
So that happened.
And I had to do a little more reading to figure out what this critical race theory is, but it kind of boils down to blaming white people for everything.
White people are racist.
The country is naturally racist.
And unlike most critics...
I'm willing to say, oh, there's something to that.
There's definitely something to it.
It would be one thing to say there's nothing to it.
But separately, should it be taught?
There are lots of things that are true that shouldn't be taught.
It might be true...
Well, I don't want to give any bad analogies.
So there's certainly some systemic racism...
That supports the people in power.
A lot of them are white.
So that's all true.
But what you do about it should not be informed by that.
What you do about it should be whatever works.
You shouldn't start with, you know, here's the problem and therefore we need solutions that deal specifically with this root problem.
How about just solutions that work for everybody?
So here's a mystery.
Pakistan is doing great with the coronavirus despite Not really having much in terms of modern medical stuff.
So why is Pakistan doing so well relative to other countries?
And does that mean that their leadership is extra good?
Because you're going to see people say, oh, the countries that did right, they've got better leadership.
And I told you from the start, nope.
Nope. Leadership might be the least important variable.
Because most of the leaders were just doing what the experts told them to do, and most of the experts were telling them similar stuff.
But they're getting wildly different outcomes.
If you get wildly different outcomes, and the leaders are largely doing the same basic stuff, that kind of tells you that leadership isn't the thing that is the main variable.
There's something else. And with Pakistan, it remains a mystery.
They actually don't know why they're doing so well.
So I did a little digging in.
And some of you are a little ahead of me in the comments.
I looked at the obesity rates for different countries.
And I thought, well, I'll just compare some of the big countries that we talk about.
Let's say Germany and the United States.
So, the United States has 36% obesity.
36% of adult Americans, or is it all Americans?
I don't know. Probably adults. But 36% Or obese.
Or overweight.
We rank 12th, so we're in the top 12 out of 191 countries.
So out of 191 countries, we're in the top 12 of fatness.
Now we know that obesity is one of the biggest comorbidities.
So all things being equal, if we had the best president ever, How should we do compared to, say, Germany that has 22%?
Now, the difference between 22% obesity and 36?
That's a big difference!
That's a big difference!
So Germany is ranked 79th in obesity.
We're ranked 12th.
They're ranked all the way down in 79th.
So if Germany and the United States Did exactly the same capable job, what would be the outcome?
Well, the outcome should be if we did just as good leadership, both ways, we would have way more deaths in the United States because we're fatter.
Does anybody disagree with that?
I feel like that's just a plain statement of the obvious.
Then I looked at the other comorbidity, if I could call it that.
I shouldn't call it that because somebody's going to say that sounds racist.
But since black Americans are way disproportionately affected, the next question you'd ask is, how many black people live in Germany?
How many black people live in the United States?
And see if there's any difference.
Because if they had the same amount of black people, at least that variable would be somewhat controlled, and you could say, oh, the difference might be the obesity and maybe a little leadership, But it has nothing to do with the number of black people who live there, even though we know black people get far more hit by the coronavirus, because they have the same amount.
Do they have the same amount?
Well, the United States has 13%, and Germany has rounds to zero.
So I had a little trouble to find the exact number, But Germany has fewer than 2 million black Germans, and the United States is 13% times 300x million, 40, 50 million.
So we've got 40 or 50 million black citizens who are, you know, the most at risk.
And Germany has, like, less than 2 million.
How do we not run the numbers and normalize for this?
Let me say it as clearly as possible.
Anybody who says to you, well, Germany did well and the United States didn't, therefore leadership is different, is just an idiot.
That's really dumb.
Because these gigantic variables that we do know matter.
We do know that age matters.
We do know that obesity matters.
We do know that the quality of the healthcare matters.
A lot of these things matter.
Let's go further.
Would you think that if it's true...
Oh, and by the way, let's talk about obesity some more.
So where is China on the list of obesity, or Japan?
Would you agree that China and Japan are two populated, dense countries in which they seem to be giving credit for doing a good job of getting on top of the coronavirus?
And in Japan especially, they've got a lot of older people, and they still did a good job.
Where do they rank on obesity?
And of 191, China is 169th.
They're toward the bottom.
Only 6% of Chinese citizens are obese, compared to 36% in the United States.
Six times more!
How many black people live in China?
Not a lot. Not a lot.
That's got to be a variable.
How about Japan? Japan ranks 185th out of 191 countries on obesity.
4% of Japanese citizens are obese.
4%. Again, United States, 36%.
All right, but now let's look at the number of black residents So I ranked the various countries by the number of black residents.
This is not every country, and I think I don't have Africa in here, because Africa has a unique characteristic, a couple of unique characteristics.
One is that they're really young.
Africa is a super young country, so that makes a difference.
But also we don't know if the record-keeping is telling us what's going on there.
So you've heard that Brazil...
It has one of the worst death rates, right?
And they also have one of the biggest black populations.
So Brazil has lots of black people who live there, and the highest mortality.
Now, some of these numbers may need to be updated a week or two, but these are relatively good.
Next highest on the list is the United States, and they're right behind Brazil for their death rate.
So Brazil and the United States have the most black people outside of Africa, I think.
And also the biggest death rate.
Coincidence? Who knows?
Now, Haiti is next, and they've got almost none, and Jamaica is on the list of the top ten, and they have almost no death rate, and Venezuela shows as almost no death rate.
So those are countries with a large black population outside of Africa.
That have almost no deaths.
But they also have in common that their record-keeping is very suspect.
Venezuela, Haiti, and Jamaica.
Don't quite know what's going on in those places.
But at least in the cases of Haiti and Jamaica, you've got an island.
So we know that being on an island helps.
All right, so you take those exceptions out.
What are the other countries that have large black populations outside of Africa?
Colombia. And it's right at the top of the death list.
Here's another one.
France. France is way high on the list of deaths per 100,000.
How about the UK? Very high.
Black population for something outside of Africa.
Very high death rate.
How about Mexico?
Mexico has a very large black population for outside of Africa.
Very high death rate.
How about Peru? Very high death rate.
Lots of black Citizens.
How about Canada? Not so bad, but Canada's not as dense, I would think.
So Canada might be a special case.
Anyway, here's the thing.
If anybody ever tells you this country did better than this country with the coronavirus, and they don't normalize it by doing some actual math to adjust for the obesity, the age, And the percentage of black citizens who live there who get hit the hardest.
If you don't adjust for those things and you just say, oh, Canada is doing better than New Zealand, you are an idiot.
You're an idiot.
You are so dumb that you should not be talking about anything in public.
You should only mumble to yourself behind your mask so nobody can hear you talk.
Have I made that point?
Is there anybody here who disagrees with me that if you haven't adjusted for those gigantic variables, trying to say if it was the leadership that made the difference is stupid.
Super, super stupid.
How about Russia?
I'm not sure we know what's going on in Russia.
And then maybe hydroxychloroquine is part of the story.
I don't know. And then there's a big variable about whether they used ventilators or not.
If you used ventilators early on, you probably killed people.
If you were a country that didn't have enough ventilators, you got lucky.
Because it turns out, not having enough ventilators probably really helped you.
Because you would have fewer people on them.
And it was the ventilators that were killing people.
I guess we know that now. So, that is all I got to say today.
