Episode 1201 Scott Adams: Watch Me Monetize My Dumbest Critics While Discussing the Election Allegations. Thank You, Critics!
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Content:
Only REASONABLE DOUBT needed for a Trump win
Fareed Zakaria acknowledges Trump reelection path
Threat to primary non-loyal Republicans
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof
Evolving Democrat election fraud arguments
Rule changes before the election
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I hope that the only thing you have to do today Is enjoy the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or sign a canteen jug or a flask of a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the holidays.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Hello, Belgium.
Nice of you to join us this morning.
Well, we got a fun one today.
I saw a survey on the internet, a scientific one, not a Twitter survey, that asked people, who would you generally trust to tell you the truth?
And then they listed a number of professions, and you would get to choose which of those professions you found trustworthy.
Well, what was at the top of the list of trustworthy professions?
Was it journalists?
Do you think journalists were at the top of the trusted professions?
No, they were not.
Luckily, nurses, doctors, and engineers were right at the top of the list.
Wouldn't you want that to be true?
Right? I mean, that's sort of good news, right?
If the people that the public believes are medical professionals and engineers, and then just stop.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but how good would society be if we believed our healthcare professionals completely?
You know, you've got to be a little skeptical, but you believe them the most.
And then engineers.
And then you just stop.
And everybody else, you just say, ah, maybe.
I don't know. I'm not so sure about you.
I'm willing to go with the healthcare professional and the engineers, but I don't know about you.
So journalists had only 23% thought that they were generally trustworthy.
Now, you might say to yourself, that seems like a problem, because journalists are, in some ways, the gateway to all truth.
Everything that we understand about the world seems to come through journalists first, you know, then it gets turned into history and whatever, whatever else, law, you name it.
But Having journalists at the very bottom of the trust funnel seems like a little bit of a problem.
But engineers have a 93% trust rate.
I'm kind of a hybrid, because as a cartoonist, I'm closer to a journalist.
And doing this, I'm closer to a journalist than I am to an engineer.
But all of my early exposure was working with engineers for years and years.
So I feel like I picked up some of their good habits.
I like to think I did.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I need a fact check on this.
I think this is true.
When I talked to you about, I said I was confused about the religious folks who wanted to continue having church services in the pandemic.
And I asked you, what would Jesus say about that?
Would Jesus say, yeah, give me my individual freedom?
Or would Jesus say, yeah, you're going to have your individual freedom, but just hold on a little bit.
Take a little sacrifice for your neighbor.
We'll get there. You're not going to lose your freedom, but temporarily, I'm going to ask you to make a sacrifice.
I thought Jesus would come down on that side, but as you know, I'm neither a believer nor a religious scholar, so I wouldn't follow my own advice on religion, that's for sure.
If I could give you any advice, don't take my advice on religion.
I'm the last person you should listen to on that domain.
But didn't the Pope agree with me?
I feel like I saw this story and then I want to research it and it's maybe a little bit ambiguous what he's talking about.
Let me read what the Pope said and see if he agreed with the Supreme Court who said freedom rules and go ahead or does he agree that maybe you should keep the restrictions.
So the Pope says some groups protested refusing to keep their distance marching against travel restrictions As if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom.
So it feels like the Pope is pro-lockdown, and it feels like he would be equally pro-lockdown when it came to churches.
Is that the way you read it?
I read it as the Pope is okay with closing churches temporarily, because it's just a hell thing.
So, let's just leave that there.
I've told you before that on CNN there are two personalities that are far more, let's say, objective.
And valuable than the rest of them.
So I don't like to be the person who says that some group or some entity is 100% bad.
Because usually there's something good and something bad about just about everything.
And on CNN there are two shows that I think are very worth watching.
One is Smirkanish, who is always more objective than just about anybody on television.
He does a really good job at that.
And the other is Fareed Zakaria.
Now, Fareed definitely has TDS. He's got a bad case of TDS. But my observation is that it seems to be limited to what he believes the president is thinking, which is at least, you know, limited.
So he thinks the president's got some racial ideas.
He thinks the president is doing it because of racial ideas.
That part's just TDS, as far as I can tell.
But the rest of the things that Farid says on any other topic are pretty darn good.
Not only educational, but entertaining.
By the way, I decided yesterday I'm going to make it a habit, especially between now and the end of the year, through the holidays.
I'm going to intentionally add compliments to people who deserve them, and I'm going to include compliments...
Two people on the left and the right.
And it's in the spirit of the holidays.
I'm just going to point out that if somebody, even if I disagree with them, if they're doing something notably good, I'm going to call it out, just in the spirit of the season.
So Fareed does a great show.
But here's what's interesting.
On his most recent show, he...
I think he broke it to the CNN viewers, and I don't know if anybody has ever said this clearly.
So it's the clarity of the story that makes it important.
It's not that it hasn't ever been discussed, but when he puts it in clear words, which is what he's really, really good at, I think he woke up the left in a way that they hadn't quite been woken up.
And it goes like this.
I'm paraphrasing.
But effectively, Farid explained to the left, and I don't know that they knew this, most of them, that President Trump doesn't have to do anything to To take a second term.
Doesn't need to do anything.
All he needs to do is enjoy the fact that there is great question about the validity of the election.
He can let his lawyers, now that's something he's actively doing, but he can let the lawyers take the battle through the courts.
And even his critics are saying, okay, okay, as long as you're using the courts, And you're using legal challenges.
We don't think you're going to prevail, but we're not going to complain too much about the fact that you're doing it because you're within the rules.
So here's the part that the left didn't quite understand.
All you need is doubt.
And you get the second term of President Trump.
There's nothing else you need.
There's one thing you need, period.
Doubt. You don't need a court win because it can be decided by the legislatures.
If the legislatures decide they don't have a good idea, let's put it this way, if the legislatures all just say, oh yeah, we're just going to go with the popular vote, well then, Biden becomes president.
But if there's enough reasonable doubt, the legislatures might say, we don't trust the election.
It would be the Republicans who say that, of course.
And there are enough states, and the swing states controlled by enough Republican legislatures, that if they inject enough doubt into the electoral process, Fortunately, the founders and the framers of the Constitution, they allowed for that.
So that was a known risk.
And so the process has very clear steps.
Oh, if you can't make a decision with the Electoral College process, it moves to the House.
The House gets one vote for each state, and there are more Republican states.
That's it. That's it.
I'm going to pause this comment.
So on YouTube, somebody says, Stay in your lane, Scott.
I'd like to recommend to you a book called Loser Think.
A prominent part of this book is mocking people who tell me to stay in my lane.
Do you know I wasn't always a cartoonist?
No. If I'd stayed in my lane...
I wouldn't be a cartoonist.
If I'd stayed in my lane, I would not have one of the most popular livestream shows in America.
Stay in your lane is literally, I think, the dumbest thing anybody's ever said.
You wouldn't have airplanes, computers, technology.
You wouldn't have civilization.
If people like me stayed in their lane.
It's leaving the lane that gave you everything that you enjoy today.
All of it. 100% of what makes your life good today, my lovely critic, is that people like me don't take your advice.
If we took your advice, we'd be wallowing in mud and eating our own feces.
So, let me continue.
So Fareed has made the case, clearly in a way I'd never seen before, that the President doesn't have to do much of anything.
Would you say that the President has successfully injected doubt into the election process?
I actually don't think it was mostly him.
In this case? In this case, I think the President is following.
I don't think he's leading on the question of election allegations.
I think he's following his base.
Imagine, if you will, that the Republican base had gone through the election and said, all right, well, we don't like the outcome, but it was fair.
Would President Trump be fighting this in court?
No, no.
He's not leading this.
He's actually going with his base almost as a show of respect.
The base wants him to fight.
He's got this relationship commitment with his base that's unlike anything I've ever seen.
And I think he just feels the obligation.
I mean, he'd like to win, of course.
He probably thinks he was robbed, of course.
But I think the driving motivation in the real world is that the base wants him to do it.
And they have a relationship, so I think he feels an obligation to follow it through.
But as Ali Alexander is reminding people in his tweets and public work lately, that there might be some primary challenges to Republicans who don't doubt the outcome of the election.
So there might be a little risk being injected into the system for Republicans who thought they had safe seats, or maybe it's the ones who are closer to not safe.
But Ali Alexander is putting that notion into the universe.
Now, in terms of persuasion, you can't persuade somebody of something that they're not familiar with.
In other words, if they haven't heard your argument, you're not going to persuade them.
So the first thing you have to do is get people a little bit pregnant with an idea that they had not been wrestling with up to that point.
And the idea that Ali, Alexander, is putting into the universe, and very productively, I would say, if you're a Trump supporter and you'd like to see the president prevail, this is very productive persuasion.
And it's very simple.
And it has to do with the fact that people can get used to things If they wait long enough.
So all he needs to do to accomplish this bit of persuasion is to make you think about it, make you talk about it, possibly get you to debate it.
If you see a debate on CNN about this concept, whether Republicans will be primaried, he won.
Because that's it.
If you see on CNN or Fox News Any conversation by any of the talking heads that even bring up the topic, all you would need is somebody to do what I'm doing right now.
Just talk about it.
That's it. Because the first time you hear this idea that Republicans might get primaried by their own party if they don't firm up and be on the same side on this election allegations, the first time you hear it, you think, well, maybe that's a little harsh.
But the longer you talk about it, the longer you think about it, that thing which struck you as being a little harsh and maybe over the line, suddenly it starts to feel like just reality.
You might get primaried.
So I don't know that people will get primaried if they don't back the president on this, but he has injected that risk where it didn't exist before.
So Ali is succeeding.
What you're watching is persuasion that unambiguously is succeeding.
Whether it succeeds all the way is another question, but it's certainly succeeding in its limited goal.
So Fareed is telling the left that the cat might be on the roof, meaning breaking it to them easy.
So Fareed is doing the same thing.
He's introducing an idea that this might not go the way the Democrats are positive it's going to go.
And the difference between the way the Democrats are positive it's going to go, in other words, Biden taking office, there is nothing obstructing the other path.
Now that's the part...
That they're going to have to come to grips with.
It would be one thing if Fareed had said, well, there's this weird long shot other way that things could go, but you probably don't have to worry about it because it's a long shot and there's obstacles and there are things that could stop it.
But he didn't say that.
He basically drew a picture that's a straight line to Trump taking a second turn.
Let me ask you this.
Has Trump succeeded?
Or you don't even have to say Trump.
Can you just say it is true that nearly all Republicans believe the election was stolen?
Right? The polls show that.
The polls show that Republicans believe it.
How about Democrats?
According to Rasmussen, 30% of Democrats think the election was stolen.
Now imagine days go by and Rudy and Jen Ellis and the team and And the Kraken stuff and Sidney Powell.
And you just hear more and more stories about allegations.
And you're a Democrat.
And you're one of the Democrats who does not already think the election was stolen.
So you're in the 70% of Democrats.
What happens if you are subjected to a non-stop, trickle, avalanche, rainstorm of allegations?
Now, you might say to yourself, every time I hear one, the lawsuit gets thrown into court.
So I guess they're all bad.
Maybe. But that's not really the way brains work.
Your logic might try to protect you and say, no, no, those other lawsuits got thrown out.
And even though those other lawsuits used different evidence and made different claims, the fact that completely different lawsuits With different evidence and different claims, the fact that those were rejected certainly makes me feel safe that the next one, that they've had time to prepare good evidence and make completely different kinds of claims, well, I'm pretty safe that those different lawsuits are going to be failures too.
So that would be your confirmation bias and your pattern recognition kicking in and trying to protect yourself.
But the fact is, Republicans have a whole bunch of doubt about this election.
There is plenty of evidence that they will consider useful, meaning the data anomalies they will believe, even if they're not true.
The sworn testimonies of hundreds of people who said they saw frauds, Republicans are likely to believe, even if they're not true.
So, fact aside, and court aside, and science aside, Our democratic process-ish, the republic if you will, is built on how we feel.
It's not built on the court.
It's not built on the truth.
It's not built on science.
Our system is expressly, specifically Built on how we feel.
By design. That's not an accident.
When you vote, are you voting the facts?
Well, sometimes you think you are, but you're not.
When you vote, are you voting because of all your logic?
You might think you are, but you're not.
And I think the founders knew that.
This is an emotional process, and the fact that everybody gets to vote, and you're all encouraged to vote, and you have the right to vote, That's about your psychology.
That's about making you feel the system was credible.
It's your feeling.
It's designed to make you feel the system is credible, feel that you participated, and feel that you're part of it.
The Constitution is about what you feel.
That's it. And specifically designed that way.
It's not an accident. So, if the way this ends up going is that the Republicans, by a majority, feel that the election was stolen, they have every constitutional right to act on the feeling of And they don't have to explain it.
They do not need to go into court and then make their case and prove it to a jury that their feelings also match the facts.
It isn't part of the process.
And I don't think that the framers of the Constitution left it out by mistake.
I think they framed it exactly the way they thought they were framing it, which is if the legislature and the And the House decide that the process they feel doesn't have the confidence of the people.
They feel they've lost the confidence of the people.
They can try to regain it by using the system as designed and the House to simply vote.
Now, that story that I just told you, to many of you sort of hearing it for the first time sounds ridiculous.
Anybody who is already aware of this path, which many Republicans have been for weeks, you're a little bit used to it already, aren't you?
Think about how you felt the first time you heard that Trump could win the election without winning the popular vote and without winning the Electoral College, and that it would be Perfectly legal and constitutional.
And it wouldn't even be an aberration.
It would be the way the Constitution was designed to work to solve this exact problem.
The exact problem is that there's some doubt about the election, and it's a big doubt.
That's the problem it's designed to solve, and it will.
So watch yourself getting used to something that shocked you like crazy when you first heard it.
Two weeks later, you're thinking, yeah, that could happen.
Why wouldn't that happen? Keely McEnany used the word baseless and threw it back at the press.
Which was very clever, because, of course, the word baseless is being used about the allegations of the election being fraudulent.
Now, baseless is a clever persuasion word, and I have spoken about this.
When you hear baseless, do you say to yourself, oh, it could be true, But we haven't seen evidence yet.
Is that how you interpret baseless?
Because that would be, you know, an accurate interpretation.
But that's not how you register the word.
The way your brain hears baseless is that we've already looked into it and there's nothing there.
Right? It's not what it means.
But that's how your brain interprets it.
And that's why Democrats like to use that word baseless because it influences you to think That there won't be anything there no matter how much you look.
Suppose they had said something that meant the same thing.
Suppose they had said nobody has produced evidence that will hold up in court about the fraud yet.
Would that be a fair statement?
Nobody has produced conclusive evidence of fraud that's big enough to change the election yet.
That would be true.
Right? But notice I threw in the word yet.
What did the word yet make you think?
The word yet makes you think it's going to happen.
It just hasn't happened yet.
So yet is a manipulative word, like baseless.
But yet manipulates you in the way of thinking, well, we probably will find it if we keep looking.
Baseless says, well, we probably already looked and it wasn't there.
See? Now this is...
But there's not much you can do to battle that claim because it's a really good attack.
Using baseless is just really smart, effective persuasion.
So what do you do when your enemy uses smart, effective persuasion against your argument?
It just works.
It just works.
Well, one of the things you can do, if you're Kelly McEnany, is you can take their frickin' word baseless, throw it back in their stupid mugs, and apply it to the Russia collusion bullshit, and say that you threw the country into almost a paralysis for three and a half years, you the Democrats, on a quote, as she repeated at least twice, Baseless accusations about Russia collusion.
Baseless, I say.
Now, what do the Democrats say when Kayleigh McEnany calls Russia collusion baseless?
Yeah, they got the same problem, don't they?
They got a problem.
Because they're going to argue, well, it wasn't baseless.
We had a reason.
And then what would Kayleigh McEnany say?
I'm just doing a mental thing here.
What could she say, hypothetically?
Well, basically, let me short-circuit this.
Everything that they're saying about, and all the words being used about fraud allegations in the election, apply almost perfectly to the Russia...
Collusion hoax. And so she's pointing out their hypocrisy and doing a great job at it.
And it's also funny. It's just sort of funny.
So I've decided that one of Kayleigh McEnany's signatures, which makes her a perfect hire for Trump, is that the things she does are effective, but they're always a little bit funny.
There's always that little extra X factor, and this is one of those examples, because using their word basis and throwing it in their face on a different topic to make them realize that the word itself is illegitimate, they either have to call her on using the word, or they have to admit that when they use it, it's illegitimate, and they can't, so it's a good trap, which is funny.
It doesn't change anything.
It's just kind of funny.
So she's sort of perfect for Trump.
So I discovered a way to monetize the stupidity of my critics.
And of course, I did that with Dilbert, because Dilbert was largely mocking bad managers and things like that.
Now, they're not necessarily critics, but I did figure out how to monetize bad managers by the Dilbert comic strip.
But I've somewhat accidentally slid, and this was no plan or anything.
I just sort of ended up here.
Through trial and error.
So I'm going to turn one of my critics into content right now in front of you.
I'll change stupidity and criticism into content, which will amuse and entertain you.
And I believe I'll get ad revenue on YouTube when you watch it.
So I'm literally going to monetize this frickin' idiot critic that I'm going to talk about right now.
All right. Now, I laid a trap yesterday, which was not planned in advance, but when I did it accidentally, I decided to keep it, because it was so delightful.
Completely accidental, but it still formed a trap.
And here's what it is.
I'll read the tweet, and we'll talk about it.
I said, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Now, that's a Carl Sagan truism, right?
So we have bumper sticker brains, so when we recognize little sayings that seem to be true, they're very persuasive.
It's like, oh, there's a saying?
Well, if there's a saying, then it must be true.
There's no logic to it, but our brains work that way.
So this saying that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof has been out in the world for decades, and so most people just think, well, yeah, That makes sense.
And it does. And then I go on and I say, Democrats make the extraordinary claim.
All right, now see if you think this is an extraordinary claim that Democrats are making.
That despite sky-high motivation and plenty of opportunity to cheat in the election, that they didn't do it.
How extraordinary would it be if you, let's say, took a pile of money, cash, and left it on the street of a crime-ridden inner city?
How extraordinary would it be if you came back in a week and it was all there, that nobody took any?
That'd be pretty extraordinary, wouldn't it?
Right? So...
Where you have the opportunity and sky-high motivation for a crime, how often does it not happen?
Zero. Zero times.
There are zero times that you have a gigantic motivation.
Orange Hitler, we must stop him.
And you have lots of opportunity, because at the very least...
Giuliani has shown that there's lots of places they could have cheated, so long as you can control the witnesses, right?
If you couldn't control the witnesses, it'd be harder to, you know, to steal an election, because they'd be watching everything.
But we do know, and nobody doubts this, that Democrats did control the witnessing process and limited it.
I feel like everybody agrees that happened.
There's a disagreement about how important it was, but nobody questions that it happened.
I haven't seen any pushback at it at all.
And so in a situation where you've got effectively a pile of money sitting in the street in a high-crime neighborhood, how much proof do I need that it got stolen a year later?
Do you think I would need to prove it?
I don't think so. I would say that the logic of the situation dictates that that money's gone.
Now, is anything in this life 100%?
No, not really.
I mean, nothing is 100%, even if you think it is.
Now, even Newton was a little bit wrong on gravity, right?
So Einstein cleared it up a little bit.
So you can be a little bit wrong on things that you're really right about.
Nothing's 100%. But There are things that we can treat as true because they're so likely to be true.
Let's go on. Now, the trap was, and if you didn't spot it, the trap was that I knew that these smart, dumb people would say, ha ha ha ha ha, Scott, you can't prove a negative.
In other words, you can't prove a negative.
You can't prove that something happened because you have no evidence, right?
If there's no evidence of a thing happening or not happening, you can't prove anything.
So I knew people would come in and say, you can't prove a negative.
So Alex Leo, an ex-VP of Daily Beast, she comes in to school me and she says this.
If that's how this works now, I'm going to need you to prove you don't molest animals, Scott.
I've heard you do, and the extraordinary claim that you're a sane, rational, non-molester needs serious evidence.
Alright, so here are the smart, dumb people.
Now, what I mean by a smart, dumb person is they're smart enough to know that there's a bumper sticker saying that you can't prove a negative.
So they're smart enough to know that, but they're not smart enough to apply that to the situation and also understand if there's an exception involved.
So they're smart, but they're too dumb to use what they're smart enough to know.
Here's my argument.
Can you prove a negative?
People, you're all very brilliant.
I know you're above average if you're watching this live stream.
Can you prove a negative?
Well, the first thing you should ask me is, prove it to whom?
Can you prove it in court?
Or can you prove it in a scientific way?
Because those are not really the same, right?
The burden of proof in a court case versus what a scientist would do, those are different.
So the first thing you have to ask is, well, can you prove a negative in science?
Can you prove a negative in court?
But can you prove a negative to the satisfaction of the public?
Which would be the third domain, right?
If I could prove it in a way that I convince you, that can have real-world utility.
That's a real thing. I could make a case and convince you in public that it's true.
Effectively proving it, even if it's not true.
So, let me give you an example.
If you thought a minute ago, That you can't prove a negative.
Let me give you an example.
Suppose you had a rock in your hand and you're standing next to a cliff and you take that rock and you hold it behind you where you can't see it and you let it go.
And you also know that there's nobody else around because you went up to the top of the mountain by yourself and you can see lots of visibility.
You're all alone. And you took your rock in your hand, and you held it behind you where you can't see it, and you let go of it.
Can you prove that the rock fell?
You don't have any witnesses.
You don't have any documentation.
You don't have a video of it.
You don't have any proof.
All you know is that the situation you created guarantees the result.
Is that proof? Because maybe that's an anti-gravity pocket in the universe.
It just happened to be where your hand was.
Maybe an alien comes out of the air with a tractor beam and focuses on the rock and pulls it into space.
I mean, maybe it didn't fall.
But in the real world, the rock fell.
And it fell every time.
But you can't prove it.
The only thing you know...
Is that you created a situation in which it's only going to go one way.
So... Back to my situation.
Can you prove a negative?
Yes, you can.
You can prove it in a million different ways in the real world.
Can you always prove a negative in a scientific realm?
I don't know. I don't care.
I'm not talking about a scientific realm.
Can you always prove a negative in a courtroom situation?
I don't know. I don't care.
I'm not talking about that.
The only thing that matters, as Fareed Zakario has explained now to the left, is whether the public believes it.
Can you prove to the public that something you didn't see and didn't witness, although there are plenty of witnesses, I'm just talking hypothetically, could you prove that something that had to happen, happened?
So let me tell you, we know that the election was not secure and there were lots of opportunities to cheat so long as you controlled the witnesses, which we know happened.
And you had sky-high motivation and sky-high things to gain, lots of people involved, What are the odds that it wasn't stolen?
Close to zero.
Close to zero.
Because that setup should guarantee that you get a stolen election every time.
And so I would say to you, well, you can't prove an election was stolen, maybe.
That's possible. Maybe it can't be proven.
But can you convince...
Republicans, that with that setup, it had to be stolen.
Or at the very least, you can have no confidence that it wasn't stolen.
And I believe that having no confidence in the result, even if it wasn't stolen, if you've got no confidence in it because of the nature of the way it was set up, you have a constitutional remedy that's crystal clear.
It ends up in the House, and you get a second term of President Trump.
So, to my critic, ex-VP of Daily Beast and Alex Leo, you're smart enough to know that there's a bumper sticker that says you can't prove a negative.
But you're not smart enough to know how any of it works in the real world.
And that there's nothing that's 100%.
But you can certainly make a case.
All right. So here's the other thing that my critics do that I find absolutely hilarious.
If they make a comment and I respond to it, just respond to it.
So somebody insults me or makes a charge and I tweet back a response.
Just one response.
What do the bad trolls pile in and say after that?
Ho ho ho! I triggered you!
I triggered you now!
And I'll be like, I get insulted on Twitter once every five minutes, and during my entire career, I have been deeply insulted by a stranger every five minutes for approximately 32 years, I think. I mean, my entire experience Is strangers insulting me all day long?
But in their minds, this one is the one that triggered me.
I literally treat critics as entertainment and now, you know, part of my business model.
I could not be less concerned with somebody, you know, some rando critic on Twitter.
But then you get, oh, she's living in your head, rent free.
And I'm thinking, no, nothing like that's happening.
All right. So Newt Gingrich adds a little bit of context for us with this tweet.
He says, the more data that comes out on vote anomalies that clearly are not legitimate, says Newt, the more it looks like 2020 may be the biggest presidential theft since Adams and Clay...
Robbed Andrew Jackson in 1824.
So, I'm not a big history buff.
Did you even know that, according to historians, it's just a fact, I guess, because Newt's a historian, it's a fact that Adams and Clay robbed Andrew Jackson in 1824?
Did you even know that?
Alright. So, that's my relative.
Maybe. Allegedly.
Alright. Oh, you're seeing the news.
There's some fake news that CNN's playing up big.
I think Fox News is playing it too.
That there's somebody out in the world suggesting Republicans boycott the senatorial general, the special election in Georgia.
And remember the first time I heard that and people on social media were saying, oh yeah, Ali Alexander is saying that.
What did I tell you when a whole bunch of you said that Ali Alexander was saying we should boycott the election?
I said to you, with no evidence, no proof, no court case, no science, I said, that didn't happen.
And dozens of you were like, oh yeah, he said it.
I saw it myself. I witnessed it.
He absolutely said it.
It took about a minute and a half after the live stream was over to validate that he did not say that and does not want you to boycott the election.
Very much does not want you to boycott the election.
In fact, opposite of that.
Now, wherever the hell you got that, I don't know.
I don't know if you were talking about the primary, getting primaried, or he got confused, or what.
But here's what the fake news is doing to you.
It's the same play that Rudy Giuliani is doing Which is getting you used to something before it happens.
They're sort of breaking you in, do a little stretching.
Better get used to this.
And that is the idea that there's some Republican calling for a boycott.
So, now CNN is reporting this again.
And it reports, Trump rejects boycott calls in Georgia runoff.
So, wouldn't you think that if you saw the headline...
Trump rejects boycott calls.
Wouldn't that headline point to a link to show you who it was who is asking for a boycott?
But it doesn't.
Right? It's a story about Republicans calling for a boycott without any evidence or link to Republicans calling for a boycott.
Do you know why there's no link to Republicans calling for a boycott?
Because there are no Republicans calling for a boycott.
No. No.
There are no Republicans calling for a boycott.
They just want you to get that in your head, so maybe it'll become a thing.
So CNN is trying to create a boycott by telling you that Trump has rejected a boycott.
Which puts boycott in your head.
Now, you're all smart enough to know you're being played, right?
Nobody wants a boycott.
Okay. So here's something I've done before, but I think it's funny, so I'm going to do it again.
I want to take you through the evolution of the Democrat statements and arguments about the election allegations of fraud, all right?
Day one... We think your election was fraudulent, say the Republicans.
So the Democrats, sort of as one, said some version of this.
There was no fraud. It isn't even possible to cheat.
Not only was there no fraud, but it's not even possible.
Wasn't that the first thing that every Democrat said?
Then some evidence started to, or at least allegations of evidence, started to surface, and then the story softened a little bit, and it turned from there was no fraud and it's not possible to, okay, there was some fraud, but no one is alleging that there was enough fraud to change the election,
so just let it go. And then it turned into, okay, there might be Okay, we understand now that the allegations are not that it is...
Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped one.
Okay, there might be some fraud, but it's not widespread.
So it went from there's none to, okay, there's a little fraud, but it's not widespread.
And then, of course, Republicans explained that the accusation was not that it was widespread, but rather that it was focused in the swing states and very targeted.
Eventually that message got through, and the Democrats' response evolved a little bit more, and then it turned into, all right, okay, we understand that the allegations are not that it was widespread, but rather targeted in swing states, but you keep moving the goalposts.
I mean, before you said it's widespread, now you're saying it's targeted?
Moving the goalposts.
You're moving the goalposts, except nobody moved the goalposts.
It was always that it was targeted at the places where it mattered.
But it's still baseless.
Still baseless.
You move the goalposts, and it's baseless.
You know people who move the goalposts, you know they don't have an argument.
All right, so then it evolved to It evolved to, okay, okay, all right, Trump's lawyers are now alleging that there's enough fraud that would change the election.
Okay, okay, we'll give you that.
There are enough allegations that if they were true, it would change the elections.
But it's not been proven in court.
Not been proven.
Not been proven in court.
And then that evolved into Okay, okay, you have hundreds of witnesses, and you've got tons of data analysis showing anomalous results in swing-stage cities.
You've got sky-high motivation to cheat and lots of opportunity, but it hasn't been proven.
So while these things are true, lots of witnesses, hundreds of them, a fraud, tons of data analysis that looks pretty solid, and lots of opportunity and motivation, but it hasn't been proven.
And then, related to that is, well, Trump lost, whatever the number is today, 38 lawsuits in a row.
I'm just making that up. I think that's in the neighborhood, though.
He lost 38 lawsuits in a row!
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
You know, and if he lost 38 lawsuits in a row, I mean, that's all you need to know, right?
And then here's a little factoid for you that Robert Barnes, Attorney Robert Barnes, said.
He said, prior to the Supreme Court decision on Bush v.
Gore, every federal court and every state Supreme Court had ruled for Gore over Bush.
Every time, until the Supreme Court.
And then it reversed.
So, as Robert Barnes points out, he says, the election contests only start next week.
Because all the early stuff just sort of doesn't count.
It's all about getting to the Supreme Court, and it looks like they will.
So, if you thought that any of those minor court lawsuits getting tossed out mattered, they don't.
Not only that, but there were different claims with different evidence, or as the judge would say, lack of evidence.
So does history repeat if the situation is different?
The whole point of history repeating is that it's got to be the same situation.
But Democrats have decided that history repeats when the thing that's repeating doesn't have any correlation, except in words.
They're both called lawsuits, I guess.
To the two things. And they still think history is going to repeat.
That's not logical.
These are just different things.
One does not predict the other.
No matter how many lawsuits are ever lost in a court, that doesn't mean the next one's going to lose.
They're not connected.
They're different lawsuits. All right.
Now, of course, I think Democrats may be starting to realize, and I think Janet Ellis said this too, some version of this.
I'm going to use my own words for it, so don't blame her if this is wrong.
But... The lawsuits were really about keeping the argument alive and stalling and trying to get some delay on the certification of the vote.
So when the Democrats say, hey, you were just flailing with these weak cases, I don't think the Republicans disagree with that.
They wouldn't use the word flailing, but I don't think they'd disagree that these were weak Quickly prepared cases that were just thrown into the system.
It's just that the strategy was not to win those.
The strategy was to inject doubt, maybe get a delay, keep the argument alive in the mind of the public, make it look like there's lots of smoke, so there must be fire.
Did it accomplish those things?
Well, it certainly accomplished the latter, which is make you think there's a lot going on.
All right. So here's where I think they are today.
So I think they've evolved all the way from there was no fluoride and it's not even possible.
They've evolved all the way, okay, okay, history doesn't repeat in terms of these lawsuits.
That's true. If they're different kinds of suits.
And sure, Trump lawyers have hundreds of witnesses, tons of data analysis showing anomalous results in swing states.
They've got sky-high motivation and lots of opportunity.
But I don't see you citing any proof.
So this is the one that happened today.
Somebody on social media alleged the election was fraudulent and a Democrat said, you're not citing any proof.
So it went from there is no proof.
No, it went from it didn't happen to there's no proof to you're not citing the proof.
That's a big difference.
From it's impossible, to you haven't shown me the proof, or there is no proof, to you're not citing it in your tweet.
Because you know, they're tweets.
You don't really cite a lot of evidence, although you could, and you should.
All right. Here are some of the mistakes of logic that they're making, which I talk about in my book, LoserThink.
Which you should buy as a gift for somebody you love for Christmas.
It's available everywhere.
The books are sold. And on page 143, I talk about a thing called word thinking, where you try to use words to convince people that there is an argument, but it's really just a combination of words.
So, for example, the word baseless, which I've talked about, is trying to make an argument by word choice.
There's no argument.
They're trying to make you think there is just by the choice of words, baseless and widespread.
And then on page 67 of Loser Think is the idea that history doesn't repeat, especially if the situation is different, and it's always different.
So these lawsuits obviously don't predict.
The bad ones don't predict what happens with the later ones.
And then, of course, there's plenty of strawmanning going on here that is so common and dumb I didn't even include it in my book about bad thinking.
The strawman idea where somebody makes a claim A and instead of defending against claim A, you just act as if they said claim B and you defend that because it's easier to defend.
That's strawmanning.
You're just pretending somebody said something else.
So you can defend the other thing because you can't defend the actual thing.
So that's what the widespread thing is.
So the claim is that there's specific fraud in just the right places.
And what they say when they defend is like, well, there's no widespread.
There's no widespread claim.
So that's just strawmanning by changing the argument.
All right. Let us look Oh, here's another thing that Robert Barnes said.
By the way, you should follow him on Twitter.
If you're looking to follow an attorney who actually is just not crazy, he would be the one.
All right. He tweeted, how did Democrats kick Kanye West off the ballot in his home state?
So Kanye West was kicked off the ballot in his home state, Minnesota, right?
And the answer is that by demanding a strict signature match.
So I guess there wasn't good signature matching on Kanye's petitions to get on the ballot.
So he got not allowed.
But then after he's disallowed by strict signature matching, they decide that the actual election...
They will turn off the strict signature matching.
So Kanye is taken off the ballot using a rule, and then they change the rule to run the actual election.
There's no justification for change in that rule.
If the election process requires strict signature matching, it's a good idea when you've got a petition, it's a good idea in the primaries, and it's a good idea in the election.
So, all right.
Let me put this in context.
Do you think that the will of the people is important in our system?
Well, you'd say, of course.
We vote, even if we argue about the vote.
Sometimes, generally speaking, yeah, we get the thing we want.
It's the will of the people. It's basically a democracy, even though it has lots of warts.
But let's look at this presidential election, and I'm going to put some Some numbers on stuff just to explain the concept.
But the numbers I'm putting on things are just being pulled out of the air, okay?
So let me ask you this.
Do you think that social media collectively...
And its choice of who to promote and who to boost and who to suppress.
How much of a percentage change in the election result do you think that all of the social media mechanisms caused?
Well, we don't know.
But I'm going to put a number on it just to complete an argument.
So don't argue too much about whether this number is right.
Just wait for the fuller argument, okay?
I'll say 5%.
All right. I've seen bigger estimates.
I see them in the comments. You're saying 17%, 10% to 15%, 20%.
But just for argument, I'll take a modest number.
I feel like you would all agree that it's at least 5%.
I mean, is there any smart person in the world today who would argue that the social media decisions didn't move the election 5%?
I don't think anybody would make that argument today.
They might argue at 17%, but I don't think even Democrats would argue 5%, would they?
So let's put a pin in that.
So let's say the social media moved at 5%, and of course would have moved at 5% toward Biden.
How about the fake news?
Does the fact that we just saw a survey that showed that Democrats actually haven't seen a lot of the news...
Haven't seen stuff about Hunter Biden.
Haven't seen allegations about Tara Reade and all that.
If you put together all of the The hoaxes, the drinking bleach hoax, the fine people hoax, and then all the news that they don't even show, how much as a percentage, and again, these are just more conceptual percentages, there's no real science here, how much do you think that cumulatively moved the needle?
Now, of course, you've got Fox News, a very powerful entity, You know, persuading in the other direction.
But I would say that the fake news, probably, I'm going to say 5%.
Now, I see bigger estimates in the comments.
20%, 35%, 75%.
I don't doubt your numbers.
So I'm not going to say that your estimate that it moved is 75%.
I'm not going to say that's wrong.
I'm just going to say a modest number to make a larger point, right?
Say 5%. How about rule changes?
How many rule or law changes did we see just before the election?
Well, the one I talked about, Robert Barnes talked about a rule change that kicked Kanye off the ballot.
Had he been on the ballot, would it have changed the election?
I think so. What about changes to having unsolicited mail-in ballots sent to everybody?
That was a rule change, right?
How much did that affect things?
Well, we knew that Democrats would be more likely mail-in ballot people, and we knew that Republicans were more vote-in-person people.
So I think every expert I would agree that if you look at the cumulative number of rule changes about signature matching and where witnesses can be and where they can stand.
There were decisions made by judges that should have been legislators.
If you just take all of those rule changes together, How much did they move the election?
Well, I'll be modest again.
I'll say 5% again. Because I don't know.
I mean, could it be more? I'll just say 5%.
All right? So how much did COVID change the outcome?
Now, in one way it changed it is that it caused some of the rule changes, such as unsolicited mail-in ballots.
But how much did it change it beyond that?
How many people didn't vote because they didn't want to take a risk?
You know, people who didn't want to mail in a ballot, but they were afraid of going in person.
We don't know. But I would say that it probably changed things.
I mean, it probably had some effect, right?
So how much did fraud change the election?
Well, some of you are going to say, 100%.
You know, it flipped the result.
Some of you are going to say, well, there's some, but maybe not enough to change the election.
In my opinion, it's at least 5%.
Just subjective, just an opinion, don't ask me to prove it.
I'm just saying that I live in the real world, and when you see a situation that looks like this one, where you have all the opportunity in the world to cheat, plenty of opportunity, As long as you can control the witnesses, which is true, and sky-high motivation to do it, like just through-the-roof motivation, you're going to get at least 5% fraud.
I mean, I would estimate massive fraud, but it's at least 5%.
So let's take these together.
So again, I'm taking the low end of what I think most of you think could be much bigger impacts, but let's look at them together.
Social media, maybe move things 5%.
Fake news, 5%.
Rule changes, 5%.
COVID, I don't know, maybe another 5%.
Fraud, maybe 5%.
Now, if you add all these together...
How many did you get here?
5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%?
And most of that movement would be toward Biden?
How much did the will of the people factor into this election?
Zero. Zero.
Now, you could argue that the will of the people had to at least get within striking distance.
Like, it had to be a close-ish election.
For the will of the people to be completely irrelevant, right?
So I guess in some sense, we at least got it to a tie.
So in some hypothetical, theoretical sense, then the people's will made some difference.
But the total amount that the vote changes, we're talking about this 2%, 3% thing, but we've got probably at least 25% impact of things that have nothing to do with the will of the people.
Completely unrelated.
So, do we even have a democracy?
No. No.
No, we don't. It's not even close.
We're not even in the same universe as a democracy or a republic.
You know, whenever I say democracy about the United States, you're all smart enough to translate that into your mind, right?
We're a republic with democratic elements to our system.
Yeah, we're not even close.
But here's the weird thing.
Are you okay with it?
Now, you're not okay with the result.
So a lot of you are not okay with the outcome.
But are you okay with the fact that we live in a country that is not even close to a democracy in terms of presidential elections?
Not even close. We're not anywhere near it.
Well, Weirdly, we all complain about it, and none of us are okay with it in terms of the outcome, but we kind of do accept it.
Remember this rule that sounds so trivial, but it explains so much of life?
You can get used to anything.
You can get used to anything.
And we live in a system that's not even close to a democracy or republic.
While we all want that, we just sort of got used to it.
Now, part of how you can get used to it is sort of understanding that, as Newt Gingrich says, there probably has been mischief forever.
Probably there's never been an election that was as fair as it needed to be.
Probably we've never had the system that we thought we did, that we were taught in school.
It probably never existed.
But what changed is now you know it.
And what changed is that the fake news and social media became more powerful.
So it's even more obvious that it was never what you thought it was.
It's just more obvious.
But it's probably not that different in terms.
So, let me ask you this.
If our system is, as I say, not a democracy, but rather is a competition between oligarchs, is that worse?
If you had a choice of a benevolent dictator or a very flawed democracy where the wrong person could get elected, which one's a better system?
If you knew, and of course this is the hard part because you can't guarantee that a dictator is benevolent and absolute power corrupts, so it's a tough deal, but if you could get it, If there were any way that that's possible, and I think it's basically not, but if it were possible, that would be a better system than a democracy, as long as the people liked their system and weren't complaining about it.
But what about the system we actually do have?
It's not a democracy.
It's not any kind of a dictatorship, clearly.
But it's definitely a war between oligarchs and persuaders.
There's this hidden underground war.
Now you've got the data analysts who are coming in like an infantry.
The Republicans send in the data analysts.
It's just like a war.
They said, all right, we've got the tanks over here.
We better call in the air support over here.
We've got the data analysts.
Move the data analysts in.
We've got the money people, all right, bring in the billionaires.
Then the billionaires, you know, compete with fighting and say, all right, bring in the networks.
Networks, come online.
And the networks come in and Fox News fights CNN and stuff like that.
But our process is now maybe 20...
Rich people fighting it out for control.
It's 20 rich people fighting it out for control.
That is our system. Is it worse than like an actual democracy?
Probably not.
Probably not.
If you think I'm complaining, I'm not.
I'm just noting that you don't live in the reality that you hope to live in.
I don't know if it's worse.
Because isn't the United States doing pretty well, I mean, compared to other countries?
And hasn't our system really, realistically, it's always been this battle of 20 powerful people, and then they decide, based on their little battle, who it is that the public thinks is president?
That's kind of what's going on.
I don't know if it's any different than it's ever been.
And so, I'm not going to complain about it because all of our systems have flaws, but it is useful to know something more about your reality.
All right. I don't remember if I said this or I thought I said it, but I had asked the other day whether it was possible to create a voting app or a voting system that is, you know, Credible and free from fraud.
And a lot of smart people said no, that we don't have the technology to do that.
I vehemently disagree.
I believe that if you assemble the various technologies that do exist, we already have everything we need.
Blockchain being, you know, one component.
As smart people have said, you need to not just check that the vote happened the way the person voted.
You need to also be able to check that the person voting is the person you want to vote, and that they have the right to vote.
You can do all that. I believe that's completely doable.
All right. Best Periscope ever?
Thank you. I don't know that it was, but I always like to hear that.
Somebody says a representative democracy is an oligarchy.
Kind of is, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah, a representative democracy, but at least in theory, The oligarchs would be ones you voted for, but in reality, voters don't have that much effect on the presidency today.
Somebody says you don't need blockchain.
I believe that too. I think you don't need blockchain.
I'm not as well informed to know, but why would you need blockchain if you could just audit your own vote?
If after you voted, And, you know, the election's done and certified.
You can just check your app and it shows you the vote on the database and you know it got there.
Would you need blockchain?
I don't know. I feel as if you could get there without it, but I'm not the expert.
All right. Somebody says the Fareed Zakario video is from September.
Interesting. But it's on social media recently.
So if that's true, and it probably is, I wouldn't doubt that at all.
So if you want to modify in your head what I said about Fareed, the only thing you would change is that it's new information to his crowd.
I've got a feeling that they are not hearing that because when they argue about it, they don't act like they know that path is there.
And I think what's also new is that if it's true that it's from September, and it probably is, when Fareed was first saying it, it probably sounded really theoretical.
But if you fast-forward from September to today, does it sound theoretical?
Because now you can observe that the president's attorneys have succeeded in convincing at least the Republican public That it was fraudulent.
Do you think that didn't affect the Republican politicians?
No. If the Republican public thinks the election was stolen, the politicians kind of need to think that too, even if they don't think it.
They're going to have to agree with their base on that.
It's too important. Somebody says McConnell and Graham got thousands of illegal votes.
Well, the thing that you will never catch me doing...
is acting like fraud could only happen on one side.
But I am wondering why we're not hearing accusations from Democrats that Republicans also did some fraud.
So there's another dog that's not barking.
Do you hear it? Where are the Democrats who normally just throw back whatever accusation you throw at them, right?
I mean, it works both ways.
If anybody accuses anybody of anything, The other side, in five seconds, will say, well, you're doing it.
You did it last year.
We're just doing what you did.
So, are you a little bit curious that the most obvious thing that should be happening now is the Democrats saying, you say we stole the election?
Yeah, what about your Republican-controlled towns?
What about them? They're stealing elections.
I've got witnesses. Where are those?
Because there's a trap there, right?
If the Democrats decided that they would say, hey, you guys are cheating too, then Trump becomes president.
Because if the Democrats think there was cheating, and the Republicans think there was cheating, and we don't know the net of the cheating, the election doesn't get certified, the House votes, and Trump gets a second term.
So the Democrats, even if they think Republicans massively cheated in other places, You know, the Republicans are making claims about the swing states.
But maybe, maybe, where there was a little more Republican control of a local election, you don't think there was any fraud in any local election, you know, at least within the city, that was Republican control?
None? I would submit to you that the Democrats probably have a whole bunch of examples that they're just sitting on.
Because they don't want to raise the idea that fraud is possible.
Because the biggest part of the point is it's not possible.
So they have cut themselves off from their most normal...
I just realized I'm not wearing my ring on camera.
I take it off to type, because sometimes it limits my finger movement.
But I'm still married, in case you're wondering.
Anyway, I think I finished my point.
That's all for now, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
All right, Periscope is off, and YouTube, you have my full attention.
Yeah, the slaughter meter became the wrong measurement for the situation because what happened was I do still think that in terms of the original purpose of the slaughter meter was predicting that Trump would get the right number of votes to be re-elected.
I still think that's true.
It's just I don't know if we'll ever be able to know.
Will the system ever suss that out?
So the slaughter meter was designed about how many votes Trump would get.
I'm reluctant to repurpose it and say it's now the odds that the legal and constitutional system will put him back in power.
So I'm going to just skip that for now, I think.
What is my prediction of who will take office?
Biden. So my prediction that Biden will take office is not based on the legal challenge.
It's not based on how many votes there were, whether or not there was fraud, or whether or not it can be proven.
Or even if the fraud was enough to reverse the election.
It's based on the fact that I don't think the courts could...
Could inject this much, let's say, damage into the system.
That I believe the courts would ignore the law to protect the system.
And I'd be okay with that, actually.
Now, I'm not sure it's the right decision, but in terms of the balance, if the Supreme Court is ever confronted with a decision...
Where they could be technically, legally, constitutionally accurate, but if they are, it will destroy the country?
I depend on them to protect the country first.
Right? And I think I can depend on that.
They're going to protect the country, and they're going to avoid a civil war, even if it means a ridiculous decision.
So I don't think the Supreme Court can be the help that the President wants.
And I think that the social media and fake news are now powerful enough that they can just bully Biden into office and just tell you it was all fine.
So I don't think Trump has the power to overcome those forces.
But it's not impossible.
Like Fareed Zakaria said, apparently in September, there's a path with no obstacle.
