Episode 1152 Scott Adams: ACB, Found Ballots, Trump's Immunity, Court Packing, Extremism, Pelosi Blunders
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Content:
Current death rate for COVID19 with new medications
Democrats gaslighting themselves
The natural evolution of Antifa
President Trump's COVID19 immunity
Pelosi's 25th Amendment committee to remove Biden
Court packing considerations
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Come on in. It's time for the best part of the day.
Yeah. I tell you that every time, and every time you're a little bit skeptical, and then by the end of the day you say...
He was right again. It was the best part of my day.
And all you need to enjoy it to its fullest, to its maximum potential, is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Including your Supreme Court nominations.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip and it happens now.
Go. Oh yes.
Divine. Let me begin by talking about your entertainment options.
Which are looking good, by the way.
I've told you before that I don't like fiction.
But I'm going to give you some Non-fiction and some one-fiction that is totally worth watching.
Are you ready? Star Trek Discovery is coming back for its third season.
Come on, you care a little bit.
Now, unfortunately, you have to have CBS All Access, so it's a subscription service.
And I'll tell you what's unusual about this.
If you're like me in this particular way, It may have annoyed you that there's a trend in science fiction where they remove all the male lead characters, because traditionally it was a male lead for science fiction, and they replace them with women and women of color.
And you say to yourself, I get what you're trying to do.
I'm all for the diversity.
I like the inclusiveness of it.
But it feels like when you try to put too hard the social filter on stuff, it can step on the creative part.
And so when I'd watch it, I'd think, ah, you're just trying too hard to be inclusive, which is good.
Inclusivity, all great.
But sometimes it's a tough fit into an existing property.
And of course, Star Trek did a version of that, Star Trek Discovery did.
By casting the lead as a woman of color.
And when I first started on, I said to myself, oh, it's going to be another one of these shows where no offense to the actors or any of the people involved.
There's no insult, nothing going on here that's negative.
It's just, I just wanted to watch a show.
I didn't need to be preached to.
I don't need to be fixed.
I just wanted to watch a Star Trek show.
And then I turned it on, and I'm going to give them credit.
The actress that they cast in the lead role, who plays the part of Michael Burnham.
So here's the part that is funny.
Without any explanation, they made the lead character in this Star Trek I think she's black.
She's a woman of color. And her first name is Michael, spelled exactly like a guy.
And I'd love to hear the story behind that.
Was it originally written for a man, and they just said, let's just keep the name?
Or is it a wink to what they were doing?
Is it a way to tell the audience, okay, okay, audience, you know, maybe we're trying a little too hard to To make this inclusive, but we're going to wink at you and just keep the name of the character a man's name.
And I don't know. I don't know what the real story is behind it.
But here's the punchline to it all.
The lead actress that they picked is really good.
She's really good.
And if you watch the thing, you do come away saying, okay, they picked the right person.
The casting was actually really, really good, and the show is tremendous.
So I love the show.
You have to be a Star Trek fan to like it, but I would say it's maybe one of the best.
It's definitely movie-quality production.
And more on entertainment.
Did you know that if you have the premium version of YouTube, That you can listen to content such as this while you're using your other apps.
So I was informed yesterday that you have to have the premium version or it doesn't work.
I didn't know that when I first tweeted about it.
But if you have premium YouTube, which you should have, because I would say YouTube is the best entertainment platform right now of all entertainment, TV, movies, streaming, Netflix, if you counted them all, They don't really add up to anything close to what YouTube is as an entertainment platform.
And that feature to be able to use your other apps is important.
So get the premium if you want to have that feature.
Here's some more entertainment.
And this one's really good.
The Plot Against the President by Lee Smith.
Now, you may have heard of it.
It goes through the whole story of Devin Noonan and the The Russia collusion.
Now, you're going to say to yourself the same thing that I said to myself.
I said, Scott, you are sick of that story because you've been hearing nothing but Russia collusion, blah, blah, blah, for months and months and months and years, in fact.
I was completely blown away by how much I didn't know about that story.
And the stuff you don't know really matters.
And while I knew all the parts, so in a general way I knew this part happened, this person was involved, something generally like this happened, but when you see it all put together in a package, And then you can see the connections and how everything is connected to everything else.
It is abso-frickin' mind-blowingly, you won't even be the same after you watch it.
This is one of those pieces of content that when you walk away, you say to yourself, alright, I'm now a different person.
I would say that it changed me.
It literally changed me.
Because going into it, I would have said to myself, yeah, lots of people made sketchy decisions.
I think in some way, you know, they're bad people, we should avoid that.
I had sort of general feelings about that whole thing.
But wow, when you see it packaged, and you realize what real people did...
People that were elected, people who were put in important positions, when you see it all together, it will change you.
Suddenly, what you thought were conspiracy theories before, sometimes you'll hear a story and you'll say to yourself, yeah, right on the surface, you know that's not true, because people don't do that kind of thing.
That only happens in movies.
In the real world, nobody's going to put together this complicated plot to overthrow the government.
Come on, that's not going to...
Watch the film.
It's called The Plot Against the President.
You can get it on Vimeo.
I think it's on Amazon. And pay for it.
Make sure you pay for it.
Don't pick up an illegal one.
And it's mind-blowing.
It's absolutely mind-blowing.
Cernovich is in it. He does a great job.
Here's a poll I'd like to see.
I'd like to see a poll over time...
Of how afraid citizens are of coronavirus.
Because there must be a change.
And I'd like to see if President Trump's persuasion on this is any part of that change.
But wouldn't you like to know, how afraid were you in March?
How afraid were you in April, May, June?
Did anything change? Was it always about the same?
Did it go down? Did it go up?
Because you'll learn more about it.
I would love to see that poll.
Because the president's persuasion on this, I judge it to be powerful.
But you can't really tell if persuasion is working until you measure it somehow.
So you could be really, really experienced with persuasion, and you still don't know exactly how well something is working.
You just have to measure it, because you could be fooled.
Here's a question.
How many people have gotten coronavirus and then also got Regeneron and maybe remdesivir, one or the other or both?
How many people died anyway after receiving Regeneron Or remdesivir?
Or both? I don't know if they ever use them both, so that's an open question.
Because I think they're used at different phases.
So if you're using the Regeneron, maybe you never need to use the remdesivir.
If you're using the remdesivir, it's probably because you didn't use the Regeneron.
They're sort of different. I think they're different phases.
Fact check me on that. But how many people are dying if they get that?
Don't you want to know? Because I guess we don't have nearly enough Regeneron, but they're making it as fast as they can.
Are we close to a point where your survival rate was 99 point something?
Have we taken that survival rate, which was already quite good, and moved it to way better?
Because that's what drugs do, right?
They don't add nothing.
So wouldn't you like to see the untreated coronavirus death rate and compare that to the treated coronavirus death rate?
Because I've got to tell you, and this obviously makes a difference on your...
Do you have health care?
What's your economic situation?
Do you have to go to work eight hours a day?
So not everybody can do what I say I would do.
But the number will grow.
And what I would do is this.
The first moment that I felt a symptom that I thought was actually coronavirus, I would be on top of my doctor, threatening that if I don't get Regeneron in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to find a new doctor.
And you would probably do the same.
Now, I have to admit, This comes very close to the category of white privilege.
It's certainly a rich person privilege, because I can go into my healthcare provider and shake the walls and cause trouble and say, you're going to give me Regeneron, or I'm going to go to another doctor, but I'm not going to not have Regeneron by the end of today.
So let me assure you that I'm going to be having Regeneron, and it's going to happen by the end of today.
You can either be part of it or not.
That's the only option you're getting as my doctor, because I'm going to get this shit.
This is going in my body.
It's going to happen today.
Now, this assumes that doctors also say it would help.
I'm not my own doctor.
I would need a doctor to say, you need this.
But do poor people act like that?
No, probably not.
They're not going to be doctor shopping and And going hard at their doctor.
It's sort of a privileged, rich person thing to do.
I hate to say it.
But we should be, I hope, very close, maybe weeks away, from having enough that you just have to want it.
And your doctor just has to know it works.
And maybe you're okay.
Maybe you'll get it. So if you don't know that number, how many people die if they get Regeneron and if they get And when I say Regeneron and Remdesivir, you should fill in, in your head, without me having to say it, also zinc, also vitamin D, also, I don't know, aspirin, whatever the hell it is that they're giving.
I'm just thinking that those two drugs might be the key ones, as far as we know.
Alright, so, if we don't know that death rate, do we know anything?
Because I feel the old death rates should be thrown away.
Let me say this a little bit clearly.
When you look at the death rates of coronavirus, it's always who died today thrown into an average of all the people who died in the past.
The people who died in the past were pre-therapy.
So all those numbers of how many people died in the past should be thrown away now.
Because we're at least at the cusp of having a therapy-only, or close to it, therapy-only situations.
So we should, at this point, we should make a national decision that we're going to throw away the historical data, or at least measure it two different ways.
One is pre-therapies being widely available, however you define therapies, and post-therapies being available.
It has to be more than just it exists.
It has to be available to use in quantity.
The longer we go with showing that blended number of pre-therapies existing and post-therapies and acting like that's one big number you can shove together and it means something, we are not doing the right job.
We're just not doing the right job.
And if I were President Trump, that's the first thing I'd do.
I'd say, whoa, we have a choice about how we count this stuff.
We don't have to count it in a misleading way.
Let's continue with our old numbers, but show them separately.
You could show the blended number and then also, in addition, show the separate numbers.
Because without that separate number, you don't know as much as you need to know.
You can't manage your risk to the wrong number.
All right. I'm going to talk about the coronavirus a little bit more in a minute.
We'll get back to that. I love when politicians score an own goal.
If you don't follow soccer and or, as my non-Americans friends call it, football.
If you don't follow the sport, you don't know what an own goal is, but it means that you accidentally score a goal in your own goal instead of where you're supposed to be scoring.
And Democrats have done this maybe at least twice lately, and they're always funny.
The first one is, and I noticed this the other day, it got a ton of retweets, so I think people were laughing, that Democrats have found a way to gaslight themselves, which is the funniest thing in the world.
So first of all, they invent this term gaslighting, which they use incorrectly.
Gaslighting, the real term for it is not just trying to fool somebody.
They use it in a generic way.
I think I will allow, I'm about on the border of allowing, that common usage would allow that gaslighting just means you're trying to fool somebody.
It doesn't mean that.
What it means is you're trying to make them think they're crazy so that they think they have an actual mental problem.
That's the original term, gaslighting.
So that's not what's happening.
People are trying to fool people, but they're not trying to make them think they're actually crazy.
However, so I'll start using maybe gaslighting in the popular way, even though it's incorrect.
And Democrats have gaslighted themselves, which I've never seen before.
They've gaslighted themselves.
And the way they've done that is they've frightened Trump supporters into silence.
So they've been so bad to Trump supporters that Trump supporters go into hiding.
Including, I think, when pollsters call.
So the Democrats have scared Trump supporters into hiding, which has the ironic, not ironic, I guess we'll just use words to mean anything today.
Ironic is another one of those words that passed into popular usage, just meaning it's a funny situation, when, you know, it didn't used to mean that.
It used to mean actually ironic.
But forget that.
I digress. My point is, the Democrats have scared Trump supporters into hiding.
But then, here's the funny part.
They've scared Trump supporters into hiding, but they still believe the polls.
You see where I'm going with this?
I don't think that could be funnier.
It would be one thing to scare Trump supporters into hiding and then not believe the polls, because your own actions caused the polls not to be reliable, because you think, well, maybe they're just not admitting they support Trump.
So the irony is that their own actions will cause them, if Trump wins again, and I think he will, if Trump wins again, the level of surprise and shock that they're about to experience might even surpass 2016.
Because in 2016, it was a pretty big shock.
But if after four years of what they believe, It's obvious to everyone in the world that Trump has botched everything and destroyed everything and he's Hitler and the plague.
They've had four years to live in this artificial world they've created for themselves.
And so now, now, if he gets re-elected, nothing makes sense in their world.
Their whole world doesn't make sense.
If you could watch four years of this orange monster and still re-elect him, What's going on?
In the Democrat world, this wouldn't just be, oh, I wish my party had been elected.
This would be a reality-destroying event.
Like, brains would actually melt.
Not actually, but, you know, figuratively melt.
You would see people probably hospitalized.
Not probably.
Almost definitely, I would say.
Hospitalized with mental illness.
There is a gigantic mental illness risk ahead of us.
I mean, really big. I don't know if it will...
My guess is that there will be protests and a little bit of violence, but we'll get past it.
So get ready for that.
So we're seeing more anecdotal reports of ballots being mailed to the wrong people.
So it was just another report of somebody who got three different ballots.
One was for somebody who used to live in the home, one was for the landlord who owned the home, and one was for somebody else who was dead or something.
So there are lots and lots of examples of people who are getting a hold of other people's ballots.
Now, that's a problem, right?
If you have thousands and thousands of people, it looks like it's, you know, if you were to judge by the anecdotal evidence, which is not really evidence, it's just stuff you see, it could be tens of thousands if you looked nationally.
Could it be 100,000?
Ballots that didn't need to be sent out got sent to the wrong people.
It's a pretty big number, but Here's the thing I need you to fact check.
It is my understanding, and it's a fairly new understanding, so I didn't know this until recently, that there is some kind of technology for matching signatures on a ballot to the driver's license records, which also have your signature.
Now, what are the odds that, let's say, their previous tenant's ballot comes to you, and you think to yourself, I just doubled my vote.
I got my own ballot, but I've got the previous resident's ballot, too.
I'm going to vote twice.
I'm not even going to get caught.
I'll make sure I don't put my fingerprints on it.
They won't check that anyway, probably.
And I'll just see what happens.
I'll just Drop this in the mail.
Let's just see what happens.
What would happen? I think the automatic signature comparison thing pops it out of the system.
Now, once it gets popped out of the system, and again, this is the part that I need you to fact check for me.
Fact check that if it gets rejected, and I believe it would, because the signatures would not match, don't they contact the voter And say, there's probably a phone number on it.
Don't they contact the voter and say, are you a real person?
Can you prove you're really this person?
Why doesn't your signature match?
Now, sometimes the signature doesn't match, because let's say somebody got Parkinson, you know, so their signature is older, it doesn't match the other way.
And usually the person will just say, oh yeah, I just changed my signature, don't worry about it, and then it's allowed.
But I don't think That the people who are just going to fill out with somebody else's ballot, I don't think they're going to count.
But that's what I need to fact check on.
I'm seeing in the comments my understanding, which is that it's some states but not all.
But remember the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
If it was true a month ago, That not all of the states had the technology to automatically check signatures?
Is it still true one month later?
Because normally you can't get anything done in one month, if you've ever worked in any big organization.
You know, one month is the time you're just getting ramped up to do anything.
But in an emergency, if you knew, oh my god, if we don't have this technology...
Checking signatures, our whole state is going to be thrown out.
Could you get it in a month if it was an emergency?
I think you could.
I think you could get that technology in a month in an emergency.
So, does that mean that...
Does that mean that all the states are safe?
I doubt it. But I'll bet they're moving really as fast as possible.
All right. So I got my ballot in the mail, so I'm going to be filling that out pretty soon.
All right. Michigan apparently has an eight-point lead in the official polls.
So if you look at the public polls, and I guess if you take an average, I think, Or at least some recent polls have an A-point lead for Biden in Michigan, a key state.
But the internal GOP polling shows it dead even.
What does that tell you?
What does it tell you that the GOP polling, which only exists to be accurate, right?
If you're the Republican Party or you're the Democratic Party, And you're paying for your own internal polling, meaning the public won't see it.
You need that to be accurate, because you're never going to hire anybody again who gives you inaccurate internal polling.
A public polling place can be wrong and just blow it off and say, well, we got that one wrong, but look at all these other ones we got right.
An internal polling company can't get something really wrong and expect to ever do this work again.
They've got to get it right.
The external polling, as has been well documented, apparently they're not trying to get the right answer.
Apparently they are politically manipulating.
Not in every case.
Not in every case.
I'm not talking about every poll company.
But it's pretty obvious at this point that they are rigging the polls, the public ones.
But imagine this, an eight-point swing?
An eight-point swing?
That is not even trying to hide it.
You know, if you had, let's say, a two-point difference between your internal pollings and your external, you could say to yourself, well, maybe the internal polling are just telling their client what they want to hear.
And then if they're wrong, they're only wrong by 2%.
Maybe that's still good enough to get the job next year.
But if you're wrong by, if you've got a difference of eight, somebody is not trying to poll.
One of those two entities is not even trying to get it right at that level of difference.
All right, I guess Portland had another riot last night, except, you know, there's nothing funny about a riot.
Except this one.
I don't know that anybody got hurt, so I can laugh about it.
So there's apparently...
Antifa has an indigenous wing.
So these are people who were indigenous to the United States, I guess, Native Americans, etc.
And they are a separate wing of Antifa.
And they had their own day of rage.
I guess this is, you know, protesting Columbus or something.
And now the funny part is not that they have a complaint.
Because I'm all for anybody who has a complaint voicing their complaint.
Free country and everything.
And certainly the indigenous people have plenty to complain about.
So, you know, if indigenous people want to complain, I think we ought to listen to them.
Right? I mean, they have some genuine stuff to complain about there.
And, you know, as well, many other people have genuine complaints.
But the fact that Antifa is now splintering into factions is just too perfect.
Because, you know, you can see what's going to happen, right?
You know where this is going.
Day one, Antifa is like a Now they've got their different segments.
They've got your indigenous Antifa.
It won't be long before there's black Antifa.
It won't be long before there's maybe Asian American Antifa.
Don't you think it's completely predictable that Antifa will break down by gender and LGBTQ and a whole bunch of other categories?
Because the left is all about categories.
And if they can make a category, they're going to make one, and then they're going to form a little power unit around it, because there will always be somebody who says, you know, if I could sell an LGBTQ form of Antifa, and I'm in the LGBTQ, I might be like a leader.
I could become a leader if I carve out a little category that I would be the head of.
So it's sort of a...
A natural progression.
The Antifa will destroy itself.
Which is hilarious.
If you just let Antifa be Antifa, it will destroy itself.
Now, let me make an analogy.
A lot of people made ISIS analogies to Antifa, but there's one part of that analogy that works really well, and it goes like this.
As soon as ISIS went from being a terrorist group to holding territory, I said to myself, um, how's that going to work?
Because the whole thing that makes ISIS work is that you don't know where to find him.
But the moment they hold territory and form, you know, proper armies and proper governments, they have targets.
And these targets are completely vulnerable to the United States and allies and Russians and anybody else who wants to bomb them.
So I said to myself, this is a little like the dog chasing a car.
As long as the dog is chasing the car, the world is in balance.
Everything's working. But what if the dog catches the car?
There's no model for that.
Like, it doesn't work.
The dog can't eat the car, it can't bite the car.
It's the chasing that mattered.
Likewise, with ISIS, it was the terrorism that mattered.
As soon as they tried to hold territory, it can't work.
It can't work to hold territory.
Al-Qaeda can't do it.
ISIS can't do it. They're just too bombable as soon as they hold territory.
Well, Antifa is the same thing.
The natural evolution of Antifa should be that they're going to try to hold territory, Or they're going to try to have some kind of a more formalized organization.
The moment they're organized, they're a target.
The moment they hold territory, you can tear it apart, like Chaz.
You know, you can let it run a little bit, but then you can tear it apart.
So the more successful Antifa are, the closer they are to extinction.
Does that make sense? Because with ISIS, the closer they were to, like, holding territory, The closer they were to extinction, because that was the point that they could be attacked and killed.
So I think that's where Antifa is going.
They will become organized to the point where they're vulnerable, and then law enforcement will exploit the vulnerability and then take them down.
So one of my favorite stories that could not be a more perfect story to explain Trump and the era that we're in is that Trump is publicly claiming that he has immunity to the coronavirus because he's recovered from it.
Is there anything that's more perfectly Trump than that?
If there was one thing you were going to remember from this whole era, it would be that.
Because I think I'm going to have to admit, obviously, I'm a big Trump supporter, but not everything he does makes each one of us happy in each moment.
And I would say that President Trump's skill set He's highly optimized toward a number of things.
Defeating ISIS, getting tough with China.
So his skill set is sort of perfect.
For a whole bunch of tasks that are very important to the country.
Let me tell you what it's not good for.
It's not good at all, talking about medical stuff.
Because when you're talking about medical stuff, you just can't use hyperbole.
It's just the wrong place for over-optimism and hyperbole.
And it just doesn't fit.
So there's somebody in the comments who might be out of date.
I had said that I wasn't going to vote for Trump after his bad handling of the disavowing white supremacist comments.
But he later disavowed them in clean, clear, unambiguous language, as he has done many times in the past.
I was never doubting what he was thinking.
I was being angry at the way he handled it.
Once he handled it correctly, I don't have a problem with it.
Because he just needed...
He needed to do that for the benefit of his supporters, and then he did.
I'm good. As a general rule, if you fix your mistake, I'm good with you.
I don't live in the past.
Mistake's a mistake. We all make mistakes.
We all sub-optimize.
But if you fix it, that's about as good as you can do as a human being.
You're not going to be flawless, but you can certainly fix your mistakes.
Alright, so Trump claiming immunity, and I guess that caused Twitter to block his tweet about it and say it was sketchy.
But Facebook did not block it.
So Facebook did not put a warning and did not block it.
And CNN is reporting that it was a false statement.
That it is a false statement.
That he is immune and maybe he can't get it again.
Now, the president left a little bit of equivocation there because he said he doesn't know if he's permanently immune, but he thinks he is at the moment.
Now, is that fact untrue?
No, it's not.
It's not untrue.
It is unproven.
Whether or not it's true, we don't know.
We don't know. There's some disagreement among experts, and therefore, as non-experts, and Trump's a non-expert in this field as well, we don't know, right?
So, when CNN tries to sell you a story that says, we know it's not true, what is that?
It's a fake medical claim.
It is a false medical claim by anybody to say that you don't get immunity.
Because we also don't know that.
What is true, and here's what I believe to be true without the benefit of expertise.
So you should not listen to me.
This is simply my internal belief.
You can check it against your own.
My internal belief is that Trump is probably right.
Because our history with coronavirus is such that having it once confers immunity.
Rand Paul says the same thing quite vigorously.
He had it also. And he claims that he has immunity.
And he is medically trained.
So he's a medically trained person who's saying, well, it's not proven that you have immunity.
But everything we know about coronavirus strongly suggests, strongly, really strongly suggests that you do.
I think there's some issue of their anecdotal stories of some people who seem to have been infected twice.
If that's true, that certainly throws it open to question.
But would that be the sort of thing that could happen commonly Or were those people never really cured, and so really they always had it, they never got rid of it, and it flared back up?
Was it maybe the way they do the testing that suggests they were still infected, but maybe they weren't the second time?
No, no. So there's certainly some uncertainty on this question, but I think that Twitter maybe needs to do a better job of labeling it.
There's a big difference between something that's probably true but unproven, and I think that's where the president's situation falls into, meaning that based on everything we know about coronaviruses and immunity, he's probably right, but it's unproven.
There's a big difference between something that's probably right but unproven, And something that's just false.
And I don't think you should treat them the same.
But I would admit that if the president is wrong about this, it could be a big problem.
I do think we should know that it's uncertain.
I do think you should know that.
That nothing's 100%.
Alright, so here's a question for you.
Let's say you and I both eat a peanut.
And I eat a peanut and I just enjoy eating my peanut.
You eat the peanut and you die.
Because you have a peanut allergy.
Did the peanut kill you?
Or was it the peanut allergy that killed you?
Because I ate the peanut.
So the peanut is not deadly.
Because I ate it and it didn't hurt me a bit.
But it killed you.
So was it the peanut that killed you, or your underlying peanut allergy that killed you?
Because this sort of thing matters if you're looking at the coronavirus and what's the cause of death.
If you and I are both 75, but you've got terminal cancer and I don't, we both get the coronavirus, I live and you don't, Was it the coronavirus that killed you?
Because remember, I got it too.
If the coronavirus didn't kill me, the only thing that's different is you had a comorbidity and I didn't, I'd say it was the comorbidity that killed you.
Right? Because if two people can be shot with the same bullet and one person just bounces off and the other person kills them, is it the bullet that killed them?
Because apparently bullets are not deadly unless you've got some kind of underlying immunity to bullets.
This is the worst analogy anybody ever made.
You should just erase that one from your mind immediately.
Pretend I didn't even say it.
The bullet one is bad. The peanut one is pretty good.
I think the way we count this stuff really has to be examined.
I'm not the first person to say that.
All right. But I'm wondering if the Regeneron and Remdesivir turn out to be really game changers, wouldn't we say that the real risk of death is no longer the coronavirus, but the lack of proper care?
Think about that.
If we're at a point, and we might be, Where the only way you're going to die from the coronavirus is if you don't get proper care soon enough, or you've got something going on with you that's so bad health-wise that it's going to take you out, even if you get proper care.
So in both of those cases, it feels like the cause of death, you can make an argument, would be lack of proper care if everybody who gets the proper care survives, except for the sliver of people who Who are so sick with something else that something would have taken them out pretty soon.
All right. So it's a real murky area when you get your social platforms fact-checking.
All right.
All right. Let's see.
I'm just looking at my own notes here.
Liz Peek wrote a piece on foxnews.com, and she talks about another own goal, this one from Pelosi.
And this own goal goes like this.
So Pelosi came up with this idea of doing some legislation to formalize the process of removing the president for a Incapacity.
Incapacitation, I guess. So we have the 25th Amendment.
So the Constitution allows that a president can be removed if they're not functioning mentally or physically.
And she wanted to formalize that so that there's a real procedure there.
That, of course, sounds like something being used against Trump.
And if you were watching my Periscopes and livestreams, you know that when Trump was on the steroids, even I was saying, I would watch out for that.
Because he's talking like a person on steroids.
He's saying things that are even a little bit more Trumpian than Trump.
Just a little. That doesn't mean I'm right.
It just means that the drug has that side effect.
It's a known, common side effect.
It'll make you feel a little peppier and a little more confident than maybe you should.
And a little more aggressive than you should.
So I thought that was a legitimate question two weeks ago, or a week ago.
Time is completely screwed up now.
So I thought that was the right question a week ago.
If it's true that Trump is off of that drug...
And that would be the one I'd be worried about.
Then I would say that's no longer an issue.
And I think Nancy Pelosi was trying to sell us on the fact that it was a general need.
It wasn't directed at President Trump.
Maybe she thought of it because of that.
But it's really about the future.
And then President Trump, cleverly, He hinted that the...
I don't know where he was when he did this, but according to Liz Peek, he hinted that the bill's real purpose was to make it simpler for Democrats to remove Joe Biden later.
Where have you heard that before?
That's right. I'm not the only person who said it, but other people on social media were saying...
I think Joel Pollack tweeted and wrote on this as well for Breitbart.
That, you better watch out for this, Nancy Pelosi, because we're sort of on to you.
It looks like maybe the real reason is to get rid of Biden later, to make it easier.
And once you have that frame, and people accept that as, oh yeah, that would make it easier to get rid of Biden if necessary.
And you add that to the fact that, as Liz Peake says, The Erasmussen poll from August showed 59% of likely voters believe that Biden won't finish a four-year term.
So pushing two-thirds of voters think that he won't make it in four years.
Now, if you think that, and you see Pelosi getting ready with this 25th Amendment thing, then it becomes just strikingly clear It's strikingly clear that Kamala Harris is the one you need to be looking at as the candidate.
And she does not have the popularity of Joe Biden.
So it's a fairly devastating change of frame if you can actually get Democrats to change their focus from, well, it's Biden, we'll do what we can, you know, he'll have lots of good advisors, you know, whatever.
If you can change the frame to It's really Kamala Harris.
And by the way, I'm trying to say her name correctly because I'm just learning how to pronounce it correctly.
I learned that from Trey Gowdy on TV the other night.
He admitted he'd been saying her name wrong for forever and just learned how to say it correctly.
So I'll try to follow his model there.
So it's Kamala, not Kamala.
I believe that is correct.
And you should try to get that right, too.
The one thing we should do is try to get people's names right.
I feel like that's sort of, you know, basic respect, even if they're your opponents.
All right, so that's an interesting thing.
And I have to ask you this.
Would President Trump have gone with that play of saying, well, maybe that's really about Biden?
Would he have come up with that if not for social media?
Interesting question, isn't it?
Because I've been saying for a few years now that the thing that makes Trump special, one of the things, there's a whole lot of things that make him special, but one of the things is that he's more tapped into social media than other candidates.
In other words, he understands the medium better than other people.
He follows it.
He absorbs it.
He He takes value from it in a way that I've never seen before.
And part of the value he extracts from social media is that it's a continuous A-B testing for his ideas.
So if you were to follow the top 50 influential Trump-leaning accounts, And I'm sure that the White House does exactly that.
I feel fairly confident in saying that the White House and lots of people in the White House do follow the top 50 or so conservative voices or pro-Trump people.
And if those people put out an idea that's good, the president's going to know about it, either directly because he saw it or somebody smart on his staff said, oh, this one's got a lot of tweets.
Look at the retweets on this one.
This one's going to sell.
And then it comes out of the president's mouth.
So when you see that model being worked successfully, that is part of Trump's brilliance.
Let's talk about court packing.
As has been noted by many pundits, the Democrats are trying this play where they're just changing the definition of court packing, and they're turning it into Filling a position when it's almost election time.
That's court packing now, as opposed to increasing the number of seats.
Now, of course, Republicans are saying, foul, foul.
You can't use those same words for a whole different thing.
Court packing, those are our words.
We're using it for increasing the number, not filling an open seat.
That's different. Does it matter?
I'm not sure that any of that conversation matters to anybody, but it confuses things, and maybe that's good for the Democrats, just to keep things confusing.
Now, here's the thing.
The fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both tell you they won't give you an answer on court packing, that's disqualifying.
That's it. In my opinion, given that court packing has such a high likelihood of destroying the republic, And I'd say maybe a third, 30% or so.
If I had to guess, I'd say court packing has a 30% chance Of destroying the United States.
That's why the founders were not in favor of it, necessarily.
Was it the founders? Or at least people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people like Joe Biden, when he talked about it in the past.
Pretty much all of the smart, wise, normal people from the past have said, whoa, whoa, whoa, if you cross that norm, if you violate that norm, it's not written in the Constitution and it has to be nine, but if you start messing with that, You've turned the court into a purely political organ that has no value for deciding things.
It would just be whatever the group in power wanted.
So if you had a president in the Senate that were Republican, you'd have 59 Republican, you know, Supreme Court people, and then the Democrats win the next year.
Now there's 110 Supreme Court people.
Basically, the Supreme Court would lose all credibility.
Now you could argue that it already did, and that the difference between, you know, having court packing And what we see today, which is if you get a few extra conservatives on there, things go your way.
I don't know if it's that different in terms of the outcome.
I just don't. But I'll tell you what does matter.
Having it close to 50-50.
Our best situation is that the court would be locked 50-50.
If I were president, and here's a reason why I would never be president, because of the following policy.
If I were president, I would lock up the court, and I would make sure that I appointed whatever is the one that was in the minority until they were exactly even.
And here's why. If If a court that is 50-50 makes a decision, you're going to say to yourself, okay, that's probably pretty valid, and that's probably just following the Constitution, because they're 50-50, and if they can get a decision out of this that isn't a tie, somebody got convinced.
I will call that credible.
If you have, let's say, a one-person majority And that one person might be, you know, Justice Roberts.
Sometimes he votes a way you don't expect.
Still credibility.
Because obviously there are situations, and there are numerous of them, in which things didn't go quite the way you thought, and that one person majority didn't give you what you hoped it would.
So being exactly even, or being off by one, completely credible court.
What happens when you've got a solid...
Two-person or three-person majority on the court.
Revolution. Revolution.
Because one way to ruin the court is to have a solid majority for either the left or the right, which is where we're heading.
So the ACB, let's assume Amy Coney Barrett gets on the court.
You'll have like a two-plus, depending on what you think about Roberts, You know, a two-plus solid majority of conservatives.
Is that a credible situation?
Nope. Nope.
It's completely acceptable constitutionally.
It's completely acceptable if you're a conservative.
But is it credible to the people who have to live under it who would prefer it went a different way?
The answer is no.
It isn't. And so I would argue that the Amy Coney Barrett nomination will destabilize the country.
Now, maybe not enough for a revolution, but it's a destabilizing effect.
The best stability would be a lot closer to an even number.
Now, could President Trump get away in a hypothetical?
Could he nominate a left-leaning judge And say, look, we want to keep this credible.
We want to keep it at least closer to even.
We're all going to be better off if they only make decisions when it's obvious that the Constitution supports it.
So I'm just going to try to keep it even.
No, he would be voted out in a heartbeat.
He wouldn't have a chance. So the president doesn't have that option.
He kind of has to do what he's doing.
Go aggressive. Try to keep the majority as long as you can.
Protect the country. But it's very destabilizing.
And I think it's the second worst situation.
The worst situation would be court packing.
The second to worst is what's happening right now.
And by the way, I'm not saying that I'm disagreeing with having conservative judges.
I think the idea of being originalists and trying to stick to the Constitution just makes sense.
It just makes good sense that having clean rules, even if they don't work perfectly, if we all agree with them and they're credible and they're clean and they've worked for a while, that's just a better situation.
All right. So that's what we're...
And today all the yakking will be about Amy Coney Barrett's religion and Catholicism.
Is it just me or are the rest of you completely over that conversation?
Here's what I don't care about even a little bit.
Her religion.
In what world did I wake up in in which Catholicism is radical?
When did Catholics become radical?
What world did I wake up in that were even asking this stupid question?
Yeah, those Catholics.
Gotta watch out for those Catholics.
What? It's the question that shouldn't even be...
We should just be bored by it.
You know, the big question is, are you conservative or are you liberal?
Those are gigantic questions, because those absolutely will guarantee which way you vote on most things.
By your religion?
You know, as long as you're in one of the mainstream religions, I feel like you're probably okay.
Now, we haven't yet tested an Islamic justice, but that's coming.
Better get ready for that.
That's common. And that does open up a whole new set of questions because of Sharia.
Is the Islamic community as willing as other communities to say the law is the law and our religion can stand aside?
We'll see. Someday we'll have to wrestle with that.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I think this was also from, who did this come from?
Cheryl Atkinson, I think, said this on Twitter, that the Democrats are saying they don't want to do the nomination, Supreme Court nomination, until after the election.
Does that sound fair?
To do the Supreme Court nomination after the election, because that way you guarantee that the person who's doing the nominating is who the country wanted.
And I think it was Cheryl Atkinson who pointed out, this is after the election.
Right now, today, this is after the election.
It's after the 2016 election.
We did wait until after the election.
That's now. And maybe it doesn't seem like, you know, it's after the election because the whole The whole Russia collusion thing made us think that the election wasn't over for three years.
It felt like maybe the election's not exactly over.
Maybe the Russians did something.
Maybe it's illegitimate.
Maybe it didn't count. But now that the Mueller report is out and the IG report is out, I think we can say that that election's over.
And Trump won.
And therefore, that's it.
He gets to nominate, and I think that's what's going to happen.
Here's what I think Trump ought to think about in terms of branding.
I think he's doing, at the moment, a really strong job.
He's doing a good job in making a play for black votes.
And I think that's what a lot of us wanted to see.
Maybe some didn't want to see that.
But I wanted to see it.
And from the beginning, I've been saying, you know, I might be crazy, but I feel like Even despite all the things said about Trump, I feel as if he might get more black votes than any Republican ever.
Now, I've been saying that for several years, and I know that was maybe the least credible thing I've ever said in the beginning.
When I first started saying this around, you know, 2017 or so, I'm pretty sure nobody thought that was going to be a thing.
And now it's common knowledge that he looks like he's going to have maybe a historically high black vote.
Still too small, but historically high, which is what I was expecting.
Here is the framing change that would be fascinating to see.
I don't think it's going to happen.
I'm not sure I would recommend it, but it's what I would do.
And so right now the conversation is, you know, Black Lives Matter.
And I feel like Trump could turn that into Black and Jobs Matter.
Now, I don't think he'd want to use that phrase because that's just too provocative.
If you borrow their phrase, it sounds like you're minimizing the original point of Black Lives Matter.
He doesn't need to minimize that, of course, because nobody should be minimizing that.
But here's how I would have framed it.
If I'm president, I would say this.
I'll fix your opportunities, not your feelings.
That's it. That's the frame.
I'll fix your opportunities, but I won't fix your feelings.
You're going to have to work on that yourself.
And specifically what I'll do is I'll try to give you school choice so that you have an opportunity to get a good education.
And I'll try to make sure that you've got opportunity zones, that you've got the, what is it called?
The platinum plan or something like that, whatever it is, that would Provide capital to underserved parts.
I'm doing a prison reform and then list a few other things and say, that's my deal.
I realize that, you know, emotions are high and the way you feel is the way you feel.
I'm not going to try to make you feel differently.
That's not my job.
I'm not the president of your feelings.
I will fight to the death to make sure that your opportunity Is every bit as good as everybody else's?
Because that's America, right?
But your feelings and what matters and your feelings, those are personal.
Figure it out yourself. But I'll be working on your opportunities.
If you want the party that will be good for your feelings, but I don't think you can see from experience, you can see they're not fighting for your opportunities.
You don't see anything, do you?
What is Biden's plan for the black community?
Nothing. He wants to make you feel good.
Not the president's job.
The president could say, I really want you to feel good, but it's not my job.
It just isn't my job.
Opportunity? I'm going to die on that hill.
I'll fight for school choice.
I'll fight for fair jobs.
I'll fight for fairness in every possible way.
But your feelings?
That has to be you. That's just you.
And good luck with it.
Here's another reframing that I think would be useful.
We keep running into people who say, the president killed 200 and whatever the number is, 210,000 dead by his coronavirus handling.
Instead of arguing that in the traditional way, I would go with this first.
I would say, the only people who say that Are people who are not skilled at comparing things?
Think about that response.
Imagine you're doing a TV interview.
Oh, by the way, I'm going on MSNBC. So I think that's tomorrow.
Let me check my calendar. Yes, I'll be on Arie Melber's show on MSNBC tomorrow.
I've got it at my local time, 3 o'clock in...
California, so that would be 6 p.m.
Eastern Time tomorrow, Tuesday.
So if you want to see me on MSNBC, you know you do.
You know you want to see me on MSNBC. Now, I stopped doing interviews.
I get a lot of interview requests for podcasts and stuff.
And I'd been saying no to all of them.
And I was going to say no through the end of the election, just because I'm doing other stuff.
But when I got the MSNBC invitation, I thought to myself, I don't think they know exactly what they're getting here.
But if they want to give it a try, all right.
So back to my original point.
If somebody challenges you, let's say you're on TV supporting the president, And they cite the 210,000 dead.
Rather than going through the argument of why you can't really count all of those as the president's death count, I would say the only people who are saying that are the ones who don't have a talent for comparing things.
If you've got some extra time, I could walk you through how to do that.
But the starting point is that you should look at How some other leader would have done in the American situation, with states having lots of power, with a big country, with, you know, we've got a bigger black population, they're more vulnerable.
We have more obesity, unfortunately, and they're more vulnerable.
So the real question, if you were good at comparing things, is how would, let's say, the leader of New Zealand, how would she have done if she had been in Trump's job?
And that's unknowable.
Right? And then that's a way smarter answer.
And by the way, that's the big picture technique.
I would also, if you had extra time, you could bring up Switzerland.
I mentioned this yesterday. Switzerland also has, you know, they've got their German speaking, their French speaking, and I guess their Flemish speaking areas.
And the outcome for those different cultures has been wildly different.
Once you know that one little country that is well managed, I believe everybody would say Switzerland is a well-managed country.
That's sort of the reputation they have.
I don't know if it's true, but it's the reputation they have.
And you can see that the same leadership from the top level Got wildly different results in different cultural areas.
Which suggests that leadership is not the primary variable.
That there's something we still don't quite understand about what it is that people are doing to cause this.
Now it could be, as I mentioned yesterday, it could be commuting and travel differences.
Doesn't have to be cultural per se.
Could be just some correlation with certain groups travel or commute in different ways.
Could be that. So anyway, I was curious about the claim that there are more right-wing extremists killing people in this country than there are left-wing extremists.
And I was looking at a report today from the Center on Extremism.
So they study this stuff, and I wanted to see the stats.
How many people in the comments, before I give you the answer, I want you to commit to this without looking anything up.
You've been told by the government, and I believe this is backed up by the data, that right-wing extremism is a bigger problem than left-wing extremism.
Now, how many total people do you think were killed in, let's say, 2019?
Because that was a normal year.
How many people were killed by right-wing extremists in that year, and also prior years?
Because it's not that different.
Just off the top of your head, off the top of your head, Scott, quit saying Flemish, please.
Somebody's correcting me and saying it's an Italian area, not a Flemish.
I only know I was reading that there are Flemish speakers in Switzerland.
Is that not true? There may also be an Italian section, but there's somebody telling me they're not Flemish speakers.
Oh, somebody says they're not Flemish, but Italian.
All right, well, we'll look that up.
That's a different question. So how many people do you think were killed by right-wing extremists in 2019?
The answer is a little over 40.
And half of those were in one event, the El Paso Walmart, in which 20 people died.
Now, here's the question.
How worried should you be about a problem that kills 40 people a year on average?
A big year is like a McVeigh blows up the FBI building and it's over 100 people.
But typically, it's just cooking along at around 41, 42 per year.
Now, let me say something that I criticize other people about.
You should worry about a small problem that's becoming a big problem.
You don't get to say, well, only 40 people died this year.
I guess we can ignore it.
Not if next year it's going to be 50, and the year after that it's going to be 150.
If it looks like it has that potential, then it's not the number this year.
It's the fact that it has that potential to grow that makes it important.
So how concerned should you be About a problem in the United States that kills 40 people a year.
I'm saving the best part of this story.
How many people were killed by Islamic extremism in the United States in 2019?
Alright, so 40-something people killed by right-wing extremists.
How many Islamic extremists, how many deaths did they cause in 2019?
You ready for this?
Zero. None.
Think about that.
Under President Trump, you stopped worrying about Islamic extremist attacks in the United States.
And in 2019, there were zero.
None. Now, I don't want to jinx it, because there could be one right around the corner, you never know.
But I don't think that story's been told.
And the story is, whatever the hell our government is doing, and especially the spooky parts of the government that do the dirty work that you don't want to know about, whatever they're doing, it's freaking working.
And I don't think, I don't even know who to give credit for that.
Is that the CIA? Is it the FBI? Is it because our military pounded ISIS so well and got a hold of all their secrets?
What exactly is that?
Is it the president?
I don't know. But whoever did this, this thing that took the scariest thing in many of our lives after 9-11, whoever turned that big scary thing into 2019?
Nothing. Whoever did that needs a Nobel Peace Prize.
Because that's big.
And it just sort of Because it happened gradually, and we just sort of slid into it, and maybe because it was a President Trump, it just sort of got ignored.
One of our biggest problems, maybe zero now.
Now, you compare those numbers of 40-some dead by right-wing extremists.
Do I think we should work on that and try to control that?
Yes. Yes.
I worry that somebody's going to watch this and say, And there he is, downplaying right-wing extremism.
I'm not downplaying it.
It seems like something you'd really, really want to keep to zero, just like Islamic extremism.
And anything above zero right-wing extremism is way too much right-wing extremism.
So we should be putting maximum pressure on it.
But let's not keep it out of perspective.
We're losing perspective on it in terms of its current size, but of course you want to keep it from getting bigger.
Somebody says, there is no right-wing extremism.
Well, it depends what you would call, let's say, the El Paso shooter, the Walmart shooter.
His problem were Mexicans coming from Mexico and immigration.
He's being called a white supremacist.
I'm no expert, but that seems right-wing-ish the way it's defined.
All right. That's about all I got for you today.
And I will talk to you after today.
Also called tomorrow.
Alright, Periscope is turned off and it's just us here on YouTube.
So yesterday YouTube demonetized my live stream.
So if you were here yesterday and you saw me yesterday, what was it that I said yesterday that would cause me to be demonetized?
Do you have any idea?
Because I don't.
So I complained about it on Twitter.
And one of YouTube's teams that has a Twitter account noticed it.
Somebody probably sent it to him.
And they contacted me.
And they said, can you send us the URL of what got demonetized?
Because I guess the demonetizing happens by AI. So artificial intelligence demonetized me yesterday.
The humans don't know why.
Who's in charge of the country?
Think about it. The humans don't know why I was demonetized and told me.
They don't know why. And they say, we'll do a human review, which is their check against the AI being too wild.
But let me ask you this.
If I were not the Dilber guy, would YouTube be checking on that for me?
Do you think I would get a full human review if I were not famous and in the public eye?
Probably not. Probably not, because they wouldn't have noticed my tweet.
They just wouldn't even be aware of it.
So if I were not famous, artificial intelligence would have decided whether you could see my content as much.
I think YouTube denies this, but I don't believe it for a second.
And that's the question of whether a monetized content is distributed and promoted within YouTube as much.
It sounds crazy to me that they would promote something that doesn't have advertising in it as much as they would promote something that makes money for YouTube.
So I tend to believe that the AI promotes things that are monetized.
So, that's a little YouTube inside story.
The good news is that the YouTube team was right on it, and they're looking at it.
I'll tell you later if they re-monetized it.
But here's the scary part.
I don't have any clue what kind of content I said yesterday that would have even tripped an automatic AI platform.
I don't know anything I said that was controversial.
Because I make an attempt to understand where that line is and make sure I'm always below it.
I am not trying to exceed that line and get away with something or push the boundaries or anything.
I'm not trying to do anything. I'm trying to play within the rules.
I tend to be the kind of person who says, If it's a free country and somebody says, these are our rules, if you want to be in this system, we're all going to play by the same rules, I'm good with that, even if the rules don't work for me, because everybody's playing by the same rules.