Episode 1118 Scott Adams: Polls, Antifa Versus BLM, My Solution for Fixing Police Brutality, Shy Trump Voters, A$$holes
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Will you take the vaccine?
President Trump, the promise keeper
Paul Krugman should help Antifa/BLM
Antifa's founding and history
Kamala told Jacob Blake...she's PROUD of him
President Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
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And it starts with the simultaneous sip, which makes everything better.
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Some of you, close your ears and don't listen to this.
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You just watch. Alright?
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Fill it with your favorite liquid I like.
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At least for the people who are listening.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Mmm, yes, coffee is the best choice.
There is some controversy about it, but really there shouldn't be.
So I was just, a moment before I signed on, I was looking at somebody who wrote an article making this observation, which is funny when you hear about it.
Remember when Mueller testified and everybody said, wait a minute, we've been waiting for however long it was, two years or whatever, for Mueller's report, and now we're finding out that Mueller was not even mentally capable?
Because when he talked, everybody looked at each other and said, you do know there's something seriously wrong with him, right?
Now, he's been a great public service for years, so I don't want to mock him, but it is nonetheless true that he did not look like a competent senior citizen.
And now it's Biden.
And it feels like, is there some kind of theme going on with the Democrats?
That they don't mind putting a white person as the standard bearer for their cause, as long as that white person is clearly mentally incompetent.
Is it an accident that the two people they've depended on to save themselves from Trump are old white guys who are clearly past their expiration date?
What is going on over there?
Do they feel like they can't put a capable person of color or a woman as their standard bearer?
They would still...
Just hold this in your mind.
The Democratic Party, the party that cares about You know, inclusivity, cares about everybody getting an equal shot, cares about systemic racism.
On two different occasions, they've had a chance to take out their Moby Dick, you know, the great white whale, Trump, as their champion, an elderly white man who is clearly incompetent.
Is that the group you won't run in your country?
I don't know. All right.
So here's some good news to start off.
Maybe. Who knows? Pfizer and BioNTech are both confident they'll have a vaccine ready maybe as early as October for approval anyway.
Doesn't mean it'll be approved, but they might have it by then.
There was one vaccine trial, some other company, I forget who, who paused it because somebody got sick in a way that gave them some concern.
Chances are it's not because of the vaccination, but abundance of caution, they're going to check that out.
Now, I'm really curious about how many of you would take this vaccination, because the thing with the vaccination is, if you encourage everybody else to take it, but then you cleverly don't take it yourself, that's kind of the best risk management, isn't it?
The best you could do if you were just like a total sociopath and you didn't care anything about other people and you were just looking out for yourself.
Wouldn't your best play be to vocally say, oh, you guys, you should all take this.
You know, take that vaccine.
Get that vaccination.
But then you don't do it yourself.
Because as long as enough other people do it, it's going to stop the spread.
You just need to get To X percentage of people who are immune, and then it's just going to die off in a few weeks.
So your best play is to get other people to believe it, but don't privately believe it.
Now, this puts you, well, all of us, I would say me more than most of you, it puts me in a moral dilemma.
It's a moral dilemma, and it goes like this.
Like many of our politicians, such as the President and Nancy Pelosi, etc., we are all, and I say we as in public figures, everybody who's a public figure is going to have to make a big decision.
And do not underestimate how much pressure that puts on public figures.
Because I am well aware that my opinion influences other people to make decisions.
Now, I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with that, but I don't mind if I've influenced you to, let's say, change your vote, you know, because...
I think that's fair.
We live in a country where everybody's jockeying to do that all the time.
Some people do it better than others.
I think everybody would agree that's fair game, getting people to change their political opinion, as long as you're doing it responsibly.
And of course, I heard tons of feedback from people who changed their vote In 2016 because of something I said.
Lots of people said that.
I also heard people who made bets, large bets, larger than I think would be wise, based on things I've said about what might happen.
So when it comes to this question of whether I personally will take this vaccine, I'm in a tough spot, aren't I? Think about it.
Because if I were to say publicly, I'm not going to take this thing, It would cause other people not to take it.
I don't know how many.
I mean, it might be five people in the world, but it could be 10,000.
It could. I'm sure I've changed more than 10,000 votes, if you count the entire time I've been talking about politics.
So I would personally be responsible for Simply by role model cause and effect.
I would personally be responsible for maybe thousands of people making a life-changing medical decision.
But beyond that, it's not even the 10,000 or so, just to pick a number, who might be affected directly.
It also causes a change to herd immunity.
That's the wrong word, but you know what I mean.
It causes a change to the whole dynamic.
So it's not just the people directly affected.
We're all sort of in this together, right?
If you don't get the vaccine, I'm more at risk.
If I don't get the vaccine, you know what I mean.
So what do I do?
What is my moral obligation?
Well, I've decided as my strategy that I will not make a decision.
Prior to hearing the full medical case.
But I will not make my decision purely on medical considerations.
Some people will.
I won't. Because my decision has to be a risk management decision that looks up the hole.
Because if you're a public figure, you're influencing people.
There's just no way you can get away with that.
Now, I could be a weasel about it and tell you I'm not going to tell you so that you could be not influenced.
I can tell you for sure that I legitimately don't know what I'll do because I haven't heard the story and I'm going to wait.
I will wait until the last moment before I make a decision because I want all the information I can get, like right before the needle goes in my arm if I think I'm going to do it, like the moment before the needle goes in, I'm going to be on Google.
I'm going to say, hold on, give me five seconds.
Update, latest news, vaccinations.
Okay, we're good to go.
But if I see one story that pops up that says, maybe you ought to double think this or rethink it, it might take another few days to think about it.
I will tell you my bias.
My bias has not made a decision.
My bias is toward getting the vaccination.
So I want you to know that in advance, right?
Because transparency is going to be...
Kind of key here.
I'm either going to tell you or I'm not going to tell you, which is transparency in a way.
And that might be the most reasonable thing to do.
If I don't want to influence your decisions, because that would be...
I'm not a doctor, right?
If I'm not a doctor, I shouldn't be influencing you on this.
So I might recuse myself and just not tell you if I got it.
But that doesn't feel completely responsible to me.
I feel like my special case, given that my role is helping you frame and understand your world, I feel like I have a greater responsibility than just going silent.
So this is a tough one.
I'm going to weigh this. You'll find out how it goes.
I'm biased toward getting the vaccination, even if it's dangerous.
Even if there's some risk to me personally, I'm biased toward getting it.
I could change my mind.
That's just where I'm at at the moment.
All right. Trump has announced, and I don't know the details, but he says he will be substantially lowering Medicare premiums and prescription drug prices, bringing them down to levels that were not thought possible.
Now, the first thing I love is, have you noticed that the president consistently uses the phrases, nobody thought it was possible?
You know, everybody thought it couldn't be done.
He says that about just about everything he does.
Nobody thought it was possible.
And, of course, the first thing that you think is, well, that's not true.
I'm sure somebody thought that was possible.
It's almost never true that nobody thought something was possible that got done.
But as a persuasion little add-on, it doesn't cost him anything.
He never gets pushback when he says this phrase, nobody thought it was possible.
If you think about it, I don't know that he's ever gotten pushback for that.
Because there's always something else that they would rather criticize him for.
So he gets this one for free.
And quite seriously, I've thought of adopting it.
You know, adopting the technique.
And just started throwing it in there, now and then.
And I'll just say, yeah, Dilbert's in 2,000 newspapers.
Nobody thought it was possible. Everybody said it couldn't be done.
You should try it as a little accent enhancer to everything you say.
Nobody thought it could be done.
Even for ordinary stuff.
It's like, I went to the store, got a loaf of bread.
Nobody thought it could be done.
Everybody thought it's impossible.
But I went to the store, I bought a loaf of bread.
It just makes everything sound better.
And I always laugh every time he does it because it works in its own little subtle way because you don't question it.
It just goes past your defenses because you're not really guarding against it, which is brilliant.
What was I talking about? Oh, yeah.
Now, I don't know if he can do this, meaning who knows if he can accomplish this feat.
He did make a change that looks like it would make drugs more competitive and we would have the most favored nation...
Right to buy them at the same price as anybody else, which should lower the prices.
But I don't know what he's doing about Medicare premiums.
But it's a great thing to say right before an election.
It's one of the things a president can say before an election to practically buy votes with our own money.
The one thing an incumbent can do is bribe voters with their own money.
I'm going to take some of your money and I'm going to put it over here.
Some of your tax money to lower these Medicare premiums.
So that's always a good trick.
Because the people who are going to lose that money, they're not thinking of that as directly as they're thinking of the lower Medicare premiums.
So it's good persuasion.
Who knows how much of a difference he can make.
We'll see. I would love to see, by the way, Tell me if you've ever seen this comparison.
We've seen endless comparisons of the President's fact-checking and not winning the fact-checking.
Has anybody done a comparison of President Trump's promises And how well he's done keeping his promises.
Has anybody looked at his list of promises, and then what he's done to it, versus other presidents of either party, and what promises they made, and what percentage of the promises they accomplished?
Now, that would be a hard thing to compare, because if somebody had only one promise, but it was a big one, and they kept it?
Well, that's pretty good, right?
But if somebody had lots of promises and they were kind of trivial, do you care if they kept 90% of them if they were mostly trivial?
So, you know, it's not a direct comparison.
But it seems to me, just anecdotally, observationally, and I'd love to know if it's accurate, it feels to me that Trump is the best promise keeper as a president we've ever seen.
And by promise keeper, I don't mean he accomplished everything he promised.
But I mean that you can just look and you can see he's fighting like a wounded weasel to make those promises happen.
It's just not working in every case because some of them are harder than others.
Take building the wall.
Has President Trump put a great deal of effort into building a wall?
I'd say yes.
I'd say he put his, you know, Put his reputation on the line.
I'd say he laid it down on the line.
I'd say he pushed every door, tried every doorknob.
He had lots of resistance.
He's got a few hundred miles of mostly replacement wall, which is probably really good compared to not having hundreds of miles of replacement wall.
And it feels like he's just maybe the all-time best at at least attempting And making a serious attempt at keeping promises.
I'd love to see a historian lay that out.
Here's a question.
Could Antifa and Black Lives Matter, the organizations, be destroyed by having an economist on their team?
Because the problem with Antifa and Black Lives Matter The organizations, not the idea of Black Lives Matter.
That's something everybody agrees with.
But the organization, it seems to me that their more radical propositions for getting rid of systemic racism is to get rid of the entire system.
And I feel as though Antifa, many of them are artists, And maybe Black Lives Matter.
I don't know how many of them are economists or STEM people.
But I feel as if they needed an economist.
And I would be maybe willing to help fund an economist so that Antifa and Black Lives Matter could have the most coherent argument for their own case.
Because you want them to make the best case possible.
Because we live in a country in which...
Democracy and freedom of speech are the mother's milk, as we like to say, of the nation.
So I'm always in favor of even the people I disagree with making a really strong case.
Because if we can't prevail against the best argument, well, how good is your argument?
Maybe if you can't beat somebody else's best argument, maybe that's telling you something about your argument, right?
So I'm always in favor of making the best case, even if I disagree with it.
That's how our system thrives.
So shouldn't Antifa and Black Lives Matter have some good economists?
Richard, what's his name?
Reich? Reich? One of the big critics of President Trump.
Yeah, Krugman. How about Paul Krugman?
Why doesn't Paul Krugman help Antifa and Black Lives Matter sort of game out and model what their preferred world would look like?
Because I think if you gave them help, it would destroy them.
Because Black Lives Matter and Antifa completely depend for their support Their support from anybody who's not directly involved in the organization.
They depend entirely on people not understanding what they're up to.
Am I right? Now, I'm not talking just about who are the secret people funding them.
Is it George Soros trying to destroy the world?
Is it some shady intelligence group from another country?
Is it Russia? Is it China?
I'm not even talking about that.
I'm just talking about the fact that the people who may have no outside influence at all, who just genuinely believe that some kind of a socialist-looking world would be better than this capitalist world, just let them make their best case.
Give them the best economists in the world.
How about a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman?
Would you like to see a Paul Krugman Rasmussen has some new information about people who don't want to tell you their political leanings.
And so the question was, were you less likely to So, how many of the people Whether they were already there or not,
how many are additionally there?
Remember? So this is on top of the people who are already there and not wanting to tell their preference.
In the 18 to 39 year olds, it's 24% of the younger people who could vote.
These are the likely voters.
24% of them Don't want to say what their political preference is.
So that's pretty telling.
And that's the highest percentage.
Now, what is it about young people that would make them the least likely to want to publicly say what their political preference is?
Well, I would think young people would have the most social pressure, which tells you something.
We also see that women are substantially more afraid than men Huh.
Why would women be more afraid than men to voice their political opinion, especially given that women are far more likely to support Biden?
And Biden is a perfectly socially acceptable person to support.
I feel as if...
There are a number of women who might support Trump and maybe just can't say that out loud, as well as these young people.
We'll find out.
So the actual polls where people are asked who they're voting for appear to be looking not so good for Trump at the moment in the battleground states.
I think Michigan is like plus nine for Biden.
Now, do you think that there are enough shy Trump supporters to close a nine-point gap That's a big gap.
Do you think there are that many shy Trump supporters?
Well, according to Rasmussen, you can't rule it out.
Now, of course, we don't know anything because data in general is unreliable.
Just a sweeping generalization about all data, especially about politics, it's all unreliable.
And all polls are unreliable, except for the actual vote, which might be unreliable this year, too.
So some people are saying Biden is not socially acceptable.
That's just not true. Biden is completely socially acceptable.
Because there's no recorded...
I don't think there's a recorded case of a Trump voter abusing a Biden voter.
Is there? Is there any recorded case of that?
But there are plenty of recorded cases of Trump supporters getting in trouble just for wearing a hat or whatever.
Alright, so just because there isn't enough noise in the news, E. Jean Carroll is in the news again.
She's got some defamation thing against Trump because he said that she was not telling the truth about her accusations or something along those lines.
Said some bad things about her, maybe.
And now because it was said on company time, when the president was president, the government ends up footing the bill to defend it.
So the Department of Justice, or whoever is defending it, but the government is going to defend the president, and people are mad about that.
But apparently that's just the rule.
If he did something that is causing him to be sued in the course of his job, which is what happened, It is the government's role to defend them.
They can take the case if they want to, and they have.
So then there's a story about Rochester.
So Rochester had some protests and riots and looting and burning and stuff.
And so the Rochester police leaders resigned.
And the chief of police in Rochester was black.
That's right. The black chief of police was sort of forced to resign.
You know, he chose to resign, but the pressure was on because Black Lives Matter was feeling that the police were prejudiced.
So the black chief of police got so much pressure that he resigned.
And here is the thing that this made me suggest.
If you were going to try to design some way to get to an end of the police brutality issue, some way that we could all be happy that it's handled, or doesn't need to be handled, or we're doing all we can, just something that would look like progress, how could you do that?
And here's my suggestion.
I think that I'm going to make a guess that there's something that exists like An organization of black police officers.
Does that exist?
Could somebody tell me if there's any kind of fraternal or social or political group which is black law enforcement people who just have something that they feel they want to work on in common?
Does that exist?
I'm assuming it exists.
If it doesn't exist, it wouldn't be hard to form one because there's such interest in this topic.
So suppose you formed or already had a group of black, only black, law enforcement people And they stepped up and they said this.
We would like to be the ones to negotiate with Black Lives Matter or whoever else wants to negotiate with us to figure out what we could do in a practical sense.
What we could do that's different.
And if we agree to it, the black law enforcement officers, we will help you sell it.
Help you sell it to everybody else.
But in order to have credibility, I feel as if we're in a place where you have to be racist.
You have to actually be racist to maybe get something useful done that's non-racist.
In this case, the racist thing would be to have the black police officers take the lead because anything that segregates is automatically racist just by definition.
But it might be a kind of racism...
That everybody says, because of the moment, okay, that makes sense.
You can say it's racist to just let the...
or to promote the black police officers taking the lead on the question of whether the police are being too abusive to the black population.
It's racist.
There's no way around it, because any time...
You know, you divide people by race.
It's by definition racist.
But it might also be practical.
And it might be the kind of racism that everybody would say, ah, okay, just this once.
I see where you're going with this.
Makes sense. It's just kind of practical.
Maybe more credible.
So let me put that idea out there.
That if Black Lives Matter wanted to actually get something done, that would be one path that I think would be credible.
But there is no evidence that they actually want something small done.
The evidence would suggest that there are a lot of different opinions about what needs to be done, and not all of them have to do with just solving this police thing.
I would say there are as many, or maybe more, who want to change the whole system of capitalism and destroy it from the bottom up, in which case that wouldn't help at all, because they're not looking for a solution in that case.
All right. Here's a new set of social standards I would like to promote.
As you know, I've said that we need to add two sets of, let's say, etiquette or manners that were not necessary in prior generations.
One of them is that you should have 48 hours to apologize or criticize or clarify if you get in trouble for something you did.
So everybody gets 48 hours to say, oh, I didn't mean that, or clarify it or apologize, whatever, and then just accept it and move on.
And the other is my 20-year rule that says if somebody comes up with your high school yearbook and it's more than 20 years ago, it just doesn't matter.
That we're all so different 20 years later, that we shouldn't penalize anybody for anything they did 20 years ago, unless it was murder or some kind of terrible thing like that.
But here's another one I'm going to add to the list.
And it comes because there's a New Hampshire police chief refused to reinstate an officer who was fired over racist text messages.
So the police officer is accused, and credibly, obviously, for sending some text messages to his wife.
Only to his wife.
They had some unstated, offensive things that sounded racist to the people who saw the messages.
Now, I say that the new rule should be this.
Anything that you said privately...
Cannot be used against you publicly in terms of making you look like a bad person.
If it's in the commission of a crime, then yeah.
I mean, if your text messages show you're guilty of a crime, that's different.
But if it's a thought crime, something that would exist only in your head and You've only communicated it to someone who you have a reasonable expectation of confidentiality.
Let's say a spouse.
If you have a private message to a spouse or lover, and somebody decides to make that public, or even to talk about it, in this case, I don't know if they know the details, but the public is talking about it, as if they know what these messages are about.
I would say that the rule should be whoever took the message to the public is responsible for the content.
So, if there were racist messages between one police officer and a spouse, the rule would be that whoever took that to the public is the racist.
They're the racist.
Because 100% of the public have unpleasant private thoughts.
There's no exception to that.
Do you think that if you knew everybody's private thoughts, Do you think you'd be happy with all of them?
I don't think so.
The reason that we talk differently in private than we do in public is that it is universally recognized that when you're talking in public, you're having an impact on the public.
And so, if you're going to be a good person in society, you don't want to have bad impacts on strangers in the public.
Of course. So of course we have a different standard for public stuff, but private stuff?
Are you okay with private conversations between spouses becoming a reason for you to get fired?
I say whoever is holding this up should be fired.
Whoever is holding the standard up That private communication should get you fired from your job, a private conversation you had every reason to believe would stay private, I think anybody who makes that public should be fired immediately and should be labeled a racist if the message was racist, should be labeled a troublemaker if the message causes trouble, etc.
So this is the standard I am going to pursue.
Anytime that I see anybody outed for a private conversation, don't care what the content is.
Do not care what the content is whatsoever.
I do care what they do in public.
I do care what they do on their job.
But I don't care what they think.
As soon as we allow that that standard is okay, then it's just nothing but problems.
Every one of you It's got a big problem because you've all said things to people you trust that you didn't think would be appropriate in public.
So, that's my take on that.
I've had a number of conversations with, shall we say, high-profile anti-Trump people recently.
And when I say high-profile, I mean people whose names you would probably recognize, and you might know that they're left-leaning.
But the conversations always take this form.
And I tweeted this.
A lot of people said they have the same experience.
And it goes like this.
And this will be the sort of generic version of it, where somebody will say to me, you know, Trump bit the head off a baby.
And I'll say, um, no, that sounds like fake news.
And then I'll show a link, an argument to prove that the person's argument against Trump is based on fake news.
I've done it with the drinking bleach hoax.
I've done it with the fine people hoax.
But often there's something they mention that's just clearly not true, or they don't have the context or something.
So I'll add the context.
I'll prove to them that the thing they think is their biggest problem with Trump literally never happened.
And then what do they do?
Do they say, well, I guess everything I've learned is wrong.
I must have a bad news source.
I have now adopted your opinion, and I'm pro-Trump.
No. No, they don't do that.
Here's what they do every time.
After you prove that the main reason that was a real reason, if it had been true, it would have been a really good reason to not like Trump, but it wasn't true.
Once they learn that, they go down the hoax funnel, as I call it, and they'll retreat to this position.
Yeah, but look at those tweets.
He said some bad stuff.
Or, don't you know he got fact-checked and was wrong on a fact?
To which I'll say, did you think, I'm just curious, as a Democrat, were you under the impression that Republicans were not aware that That the fact-checkers have said that President Trump has failed the fact-checking 20,000 times.
I don't think there's anybody who's not aware of that.
And I don't think there's anybody who supports the President who also thinks that all 20,000 fact-checked things were just all lies.
Nobody thinks that they're all wrong.
But we also are adults, many of us are, and we know that there's no such thing as somebody running for president, or even being president, who is not lying on a pretty regular basis.
Obama lied, lots of examples.
Biden is literally basing his campaign on the most well-known lies in America.
Most debunked lies.
The fine people hoax, the drinking bleach hoax.
He's basing his campaign on those things.
Those are literally the foundation of Biden's campaign are two easily debunked lies.
And yet, Democrats think that Republicans haven't noticed that That all the candidates do this.
Like they think that Republicans only think that the Democrats do it.
Have you ever met a Republican who didn't think that Republicans also will tell some tall tales?
Is there anybody that dumb?
And so the Democrats have to form this ridiculous opinion of the world in order to preserve their being right about everything.
And that ridiculous opinion...
Is that you haven't noticed that the president uses a little bit of hyperbole, if you know what I mean.
Is there anybody here who hasn't noticed?
Have you been following politics and it's the first time you're hearing that President Trump sometimes will exaggerate?
First time you've heard it?
Democrats literally believe it's the first time you've heard it.
Now, that should be Such a glaring and obvious cognitive dissonance, that that should settle the whole argument about who's hallucinating.
Because it's so easily provable.
Okay, let me ask you, Republicans, let's test out the theory.
How many of you have never noticed the president sometimes will exaggerate?
Has anybody ever noticed that?
Sometimes take something out of the context a little bit, because it makes its case?
Has anybody ever noticed?
Alright. Somebody says, Scott says, I talk to fine people, but I won't tell you who.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Now, I'm going to block you just for being an asshole.
That's the only reason.
That's the only reason I need.
Assholes get blocked.
Alright. So that's every conversation with every Democrat goes that way.
All right. I also learned that Democrats who are actually smart people who follow the news...
This will blow your mind.
Are you ready for this? There's some things you think the Democrats just say because it might help their argument.
And then there's some things that you think they actually believe.
I didn't think they believed the following thing.
I thought it was just something they say.
But Democrats have actually been convinced by the fake news that the reason the protests are happening is because of Trump.
And that when you hear that, you laugh, right?
You think, because of Trump?
What did he do?
What the hell did Trump do?
Uh... He didn't arrest anybody.
I mean, he's pro-police.
But he's not in favor of police brutality.
He's not opposed to fixing it.
Right? Exactly how did Trump even get into this conversation?
Did Trump cause systemic racism?
I don't think so.
If you asked Antifa and Black Lives Matter, the organizers, not just all the people in the streets, but the organizers, and you said to them, If Trump went away tomorrow, would you be good?
Would we all be good then?
Trump's gone. What would they say?
I think they would say, hell no.
I think they would say it doesn't even have anything to do with Trump.
It has to do with 400 years of systemic racism.
I don't even think Black Lives Matter and Antifa blames Trump for any of it.
And yet, even though Black Lives Matter and Antifa...
Are very clearly making the case that has to do with the whole system.
It's not something that Trump alone is doing.
What's he doing? Opportunity zones?
Prison reform?
Lowering unemployment for black people?
Helping, protecting the lowest income people in the country by having strong immigration preferences?
You really can't make a logical argument to tie these protests to Trump, but they're actually educated, smart people who are paying attention, who have bought into the fake news framing that Trump is the problem.
Isn't that kind of mind-blowing that anybody would believe that, given what we observe?
So that's the power of the fake news.
The fake news can make you believe something that is quite obviously not true.
Really sort of obviously.
And I have to admit that as much as I prefer President Trump get re-elected, I kind of would like to see what happened if he didn't.
You know what I mean? I kind of would, you know, there's a part of me that would like to see Biden try to stop Biden I asked this one person I was arguing with, a high-profile person.
I said, can you explain to me why they would stop?
What is the situation in which Biden would fix something that Trump is not willing to fix or able to fix?
And the argument went like this.
That because Biden would have the right, let's say, attitude...
And the right incentive and credibility, that he would be the adult in the room, and then he would start negotiating, and of course he can't get everything at once, but you could at least start to move in the right direction toward making things better for everybody, but black people in particular.
And that if Biden were in the leader chair, sure, you wouldn't solve all You know, systemic racism right away, but he would start chipping away at it and sort of moving things in the right direction such that the energy would come out of the protests and they would say, okay, we wish it were faster, but now things are moving in the right direction.
Is that the most ridiculous opinion you've ever heard?
Because I think it doesn't understand the protests at all.
Because the protesters have flat out rejected small change.
They have rejected, without conversation, any specific solutions.
They don't want any specific solutions.
If you don't know that, I don't know if you should have an opinion on this stuff.
That's the most basic thing you should know, is that they're not asking for anything in particular.
If you don't understand they're not asking for anything in particular, they want the whole system destroyed and then it will be rebuilt in a way that they don't want to specify.
If you don't understand that, you don't know what's going on.
Alright. Did you know that the history of Antifa is a little, shall we say, complicated?
Now, because history is written by winners, and I doubt everything I read everywhere these days, take this with a little bit of grain of salt.
But this is my understanding, that Antifa was founded by this guy Ernst Thelmann, he was a German guy, in 1932.
Do you know what was happening around the 30s in Germany?
Yes, it was about the same time that Hitler was rising.
Now Hitler, of course, wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic, the government of Germany.
But another entity that wanted to overthrow the government of Germany was Antifa.
Now Antifa, formed by this guy Ernst Talman, was essentially a Stalin guy.
So he was a communist who Stalin supported, and he supported Stalinism.
And So Antifa was originally founded to be pro-Stalin and against any form of capitalism.
Now here's the other interesting thing.
Fascism, as it was originally put into the name Antifa, didn't mean the same thing it means today.
So the whole argument that the Antifa people make is they say, hey, it's right in our name.
We're anti-fascist.
It's right in the name.
We can't not be that because it's right there in the name.
But it turns out that fascists didn't mean the same thing.
Fascists just meant anybody who wasn't a communist.
That's it. At least according to Wikipedia's telling of it.
That it just meant that you were in the late stages of capitalism.
So it didn't matter if you were Socialist capitalism, etc.
So Antifa would have been against a Bernie Sanders presidency.
Let me say that clearly.
Antifa, as it was originally founded, and what the name anti-fascist meant back then, he would have been against Bernie Sanders.
Because Bernie Sanders would still have democracy, he would still have capitalism, But it would be a socialist capitalism.
That's no bueno for Antifa.
So Antifa means anti-Bernie Sanders in its original form.
So if they try to tell you it's anti-fascist, you should say it is.
It's totally anti-fascist.
And one of the things that is considered fascist is Bernie Sanders' entire platform.
I'm not making that up.
That's originally what Antifa meant, and they haven't said we've changed it.
So they would oppose Bernie Sanders.
I wonder how many people know that.
Now, both the Nazis and Antifa, I've said that they were allied in defeating the German government, and therefore that would make them an ally of Hitler.
Now, I got a little pushback from that.
Andres Backhaus, who was German.
He's German, so he gets to have a better opinion than we do on this.
He said, no, no, no, you can't call them allies, because they were also killing each other.
It's just that they had a common enemy in the German government, but they didn't love each other.
And indeed, as soon as Hitler came to power, one of the first things he did was crush Antifa.
So I will take that as true, but it is also true that the enemy of your enemy is kind of your friend.
And I would argue also that the United States was allied with Stalin against Germany.
So in the same way that the United States was allied with Russia, even though we weren't friends, we had a common enemy, Antifa had a common enemy, and they were on the same side with Hitler for different reasons.
But they also hated each other, so you've got to add that in there too.
I'll bet that'll surprise you.
Peter Navarro likes to stir the pot, which makes me like him.
I can understand why President Trump likes Peter Navarro.
I assume he does. I mean, maybe that could change tomorrow.
But Navarro goes for blood on social media and also in his interviews.
He doesn't leave anything on the table.
He just goes for the provocation and he's not afraid of it.
So you can see why Trump would like him, if that's the case.
I hope it is. But there was a new study, if you will, in which some credible group looked at all the other studies.
So it's observational.
It's not one of these gold standard randomized trials that you'd want.
But when they looked at all the existing studies, they found this.
No credible study found worse outcomes with hydroxychloroquine use.
No credible study.
No mortality or other serious safety issue was found.
The conclusion is that hydroxychloroquine is consistently effective against COVID-19 when used early in the outpatient setting.
It is overall effective against COVID-19.
It has not produced worsening.
And it is safe. So again, this is a study of studies.
So the flaw, if there is one, don't know if there is one, but the potential flaw, and the reason that randomized trials exist, is that all of those studies could have the same flaw.
That's possible. In fact, it's not even that crazy that they would all have the same flaw.
Because the flaw could be this.
The doctors get to decide who gets the drug.
That could be the flaw.
So if the doctors are making a similar kind of bias, on average, then every study would have that same bias in it.
What would be that bias? Let me just say, suppose...
That if somebody looked like they were in really bad shape, you would be less likely to give them hydroxychloroquine and more likely to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we better move you directly to whatever's a more end-of-life dangerous situation.
So it's possible there's a selection bias.
Don't know that.
But I'm going to still stick with my 30% estimate.
30% odds...
Just based on stuff we see in the news, not based on me knowing something in some deep way.
But I'd say there's still a good 30% chance that hydroxychloroquine is the real deal.
And 70% chance that it might be overstated.
But I doubt it's dangerous.
Alright, I ran a poll. A Twitter poll, so it's not a scientific poll.
But I asked the following question.
In your personal circle, are you hearing more whispers about voters moving to Trump or away?
So, you know, you always hear before an election, I used to vote this way, but now this year I'm going to vote that way.
70% of the people said that they'd heard people in their own circle, their personal circle, 70% of them said they'd heard people say they were moving to Trump.
And 4.3% said they'd heard it go the other way.
Now, of course, my audience on Twitter is highly biased, but it was 32,000 people voted, and 70% of them are willing to say that they've heard people going to Trump, but not away.
Now, would you necessarily hear about it if people went from Trump to Biden?
Probably. Probably.
That sounds exactly like the sort of thing somebody would say out loud.
How likely are you to hear it the other way?
That somebody says, I'm going to vote for Trump, but I didn't vote for him the first time.
Well, they usually whisper that.
That's sort of a whisper conversation.
So this is a deeply non-scientific poll, but when you get a result that that's grotesquely unbalanced, it's still unscientific.
But I feel like it could mean something.
The Michael Cohen book is hilarious because he makes all these claims and I don't think anybody cares.
I just don't think anybody cares.
Now, of course, Michael Cohen falls into my category of he's the asshole.
Because if there was anything that Trump ever said to him in confidence...
That Cohen decided to put in a book, that does not reflect on Trump.
That's my rule. It only reflects on Cohen.
So if there was something that he alleges was racist or offensive in some way, and by the way, we confuse offensive and racist all the time, I feel like we should do a better job of distinguishing what's racist from what is offensive.
Because you can be offensive to anybody.
It doesn't mean that you hate them for their color.
You are just offensive.
Anyway. But what was funny about Peter Navarro and hydroxychloroquine is that in his tweet, he starts it with, even more blood on the hands of CNN. Which is a great framing.
Because should time prove Peter Navarro correct...
And the people who think hydroxychloroquine works, should they be correct in the long run?
And I think there's a good chance of that.
Then CNN does have blood on their hands.
And a lot of it.
And that's just the truth.
So we'll see. This is so awful.
So Kamala Harris went and visited with Jacob Blake.
Who is credibly accused of some bad crimes.
And after she talked to him, he's the one who was shot seven times but survived, shot by cops.
And she told him she's proud of him.
Now, Megyn Kelly wasn't too happy about that.
And she tweeted this.
Proud of him? Proud of him, he's accused of breaking into a sleeping woman's house, sexually assaulting her, humiliating her, and later returning to harass her.
Then the cops she called for help say he resisted arrest, assaulted them, and went for his knife.
How about a word for his victim, Senator?
That seems like a pretty reasonable comment, doesn't it?
I would say that Megyn Kelly has every right to this tweet.
Because it sounds solid to me.
And I say again that Black Lives Matter, if you keep...
What's the right word?
Idolizing? Or making heroes and other people who appear to be criminals.
They haven't all been convicted, but they're credibly accused.
If you keep making heroes and giving respect to literally criminals...
You just can't be taken seriously.
You just can't be taken seriously.
So stop asking us to.
Stop asking us to take seriously making heroes and criminals at the same time you want Confederate statues to be taken down.
I'm in favor of taking down Confederate statues because they're offensive.
But Don't then reverse your opinion and say, oh, we can't make heroes out of these Confederate statues, guys, because of slavery.
But why would you make a hero out of somebody who's a sexual abuser?
Allegedly. Credibly accused.
And then an actress who did not like Megyn Kelly weighed in, Rosanna Arquette.
Who is sort of a vocal Democrat artist.
And she said to Megyn Kelly, after Megyn's comment, you are a disgrace to journalism.
Do you notice a pattern here?
Here's the pattern.
Megyn Kelly gives an opinion backed by factual reasons.
Right? That's what happened.
So Megyn Kelly said, This person has all these accusations against them.
Maybe you shouldn't show pride in somebody who's got those against them.
So she showed her reason.
She gave her opinion based on the reason.
And what does the Democrat do?
Goes after the person.
You're a disgrace to journalism.
But, Rosanna, you left out your reasons.
This is how the hoax funnel goes.
Here are my reasons.
Okay, your reasons were all debunked.
Oh yeah? You're a jerk.
Well, that's not an argument.
After you lose your argument, you're supposed to do something else.
Go find something else to do.
You don't double down by saying the person is a jerk and don't even give a reason.
So you see that pattern a lot.
The Atlantic, which did the fake news about President Trump recently...
Now, when I say it's fake news, this is another standard which I insist on.
And the standard goes like this.
If any journalist or any person presents a package of claims, and you can debunk any part of the package, but you can't tell one way or another whether the other stuff is true, let's say because it's an anonymous source...
So you can know that the anonymous source said it, but you can't independently verify it.
But the part you can independently verify turns out to be completely false, like not even close to true.
You should discount all the rest of it.
That should be the rule.
Like the Steele dossier, if you found out that some part of it is clearly and obviously not true, obviously created to fool you, you should discount the rest of it.
Now, you might want to look into it, but you should certainly discount it while you're looking into it.
And I would say that would be a good standard to have.
So the Atlantic did yet another fake news.
There was a video of Biden appearing to walk through a cemetery, and the fake news was that people were bothering him when he was visiting his deceased son at the cemetery.
Except... His deceased son was not in that cemetery, and Biden was not in a cemetery.
He was photographed through a cemetery as he was leaving a church that happened to have a cemetery in front of it.
So he wasn't in a cemetery, really.
He was just passing through where one was nearby.
His son wasn't there.
None of the story was true.
Comes from the same organization, The Atlantic, one of their writers.
That the other stories that you're supposed to believe are true.
This should be enough to tell you that the Atlantic is just not something you should pay attention to.
Apparently Trump said in his speech yesterday that he'll provide school choice to every parent in America.
That should be enough for him to win the black vote.
Don't know if it will.
Trump also banned anti-white training in government.
Now, he doesn't call it anti-white, or maybe he does, but it was the critical race theory.
Now, critical race theory, its proponents would say is trying to remove racism, but anybody who looks at it can plainly see that it's anti-white by its nature.
So it is racist by its nature, and the president quite rightly got rid of racist training in the government, And Brian Stelter said, here was Brian Stelter's comment about the president getting rid of racist training.
He goes, it all comes back to whiteness and the backlash to a browning America.
And the president, he eats it up.
And the feedback loop spins round and round.
So to Brian Stelter, it's all about whiteness.
So that's not a good contribution, Brian.
And the best story of the day is that the Norwegian parliamentarian nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
And justification for the nomination was that Trump helped bring about the deal with the UAE and Israel.
And also he was...
He was key to getting South Korea and North Korea to be in conversation.
Now, are those two things, first of all, are they true?
Yeah. Yeah.
Totally. They're totally true.
So is this nomination credible and one that you should take seriously?
Yeah. Yeah, it is.
Now, I don't think, politically speaking, I doubt that the president can get the award, but is it It's perfectly reasonable that he should be one of the top people in contention.
I don't even know who the others would be.
Who would be number two that you could think of that would get the Nobel Prize for Peace?
Who's number two? Seriously.
Name one other person in the world that you could think of who might be in the top two or three.
I can't think of one.
Can't think of one. That doesn't mean he'll win, but he's clearly the one.
But here's the part that I wonder about.
A deal between Israel and the UAE is a deal between, primarily, Jewish people and Islamic people.
You're with me so far?
Not 100%, but largely speaking, a deal between Israel and the UAE is Jews and Muslims getting along.
Now, who was key to organizing this?
It was Jared.
Jared Kushner. Took the lead in getting this done.
Now, how does that fit with the Democrats and CNN's belief that President Trump hates all of those people?
So, the claim that CNN and the anti-Trumpers have been making since day one is that the President doesn't like Muslims, That he supported the, this is the fine people hoax, that he allegedly supported the people who were anti-Semitic, which would mean that the president doesn't like Israel, doesn't like Jews, and certainly doesn't like Jared Kushner, who is Jewish.
So this is what CNN has sold to its idiot viewers, that the president doesn't like any of those groups And at the same time, you have to explain to the little confused CNN viewer heads, can you explain why CNN tells you that the president hates Jews, hates Muslims, and obviously would hate his own son-in-law for being Jewish.
How do you explain that he's nominated for a Nobel Prize for helping those groups achieve peace?
Does that make sense in your worldview?
That that would be a major priority for the president to get peace for the two groups you say he hates?
Why is he working so hard for peace for groups he doesn't like, according to you?
Doesn't quite make sense, does it?
Which worldview would have predicted this?
Well, my worldview predicted this.
Because, if you look at my blogging record, you will find that I might be one of the earliest people who said, you know, I think Trump can actually make peace in the Middle East.
Now, other people have said it.
But I think you will see that my record is one of the first ones to say, I think he's going to make this happen.
Now, it's the beginning of something that could be better.
We hope it goes in the right direction.
But if your worldview did not predict this...
Then you should adjust your worldview.
My worldview predicted it, and it happened.
Every time your worldview predicts something that does happen, give yourself a checkmark.
But also keep track.
If your worldview predicts the opposite, you're going to have to keep track of that, too.
I recommend this, because otherwise you just don't know how much cognitive dissonance is getting to you.
All right, those are the fun stories for today.
And is there anything I missed?
Oh yeah, the Serbian and Kosovo deal.
I don't know much about it, but that would be yet another example of the Trump administration being useful to get two warring sides together.
Oh, and the other argument was, in the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, that it was noted that Trump broke a 39-year Pattern of the U.S. presidents getting us into war.
So Trump is the least warring person as president that we've had in 39 years.
Somebody says Greta will win it.
If Greta wins the Nobel Peace Prize and Trump doesn't, do we need a Nobel Peace Prize?
We can just stop talking about the Nobel Peace Prize if...
Yeah, there's a story Tucker Carlson was talking about.
There's a taped conversation between Michael Cohen and Jeff Zucker of CNN, in which it is revealed that Zucker was hoping for the best from Trump.
I don't think he thought Trump would get elected, but it sounded like Zucker was trying to maybe get a TV show going on CNN with Trump.
So it looked like...
Zucker was playing both sides there.
So that was interesting.
Alright, that's all for now. And I will talk to you.
