Episode 1251 Scott Adams: Wuhan Lab Allegations, the Coup Persuasion Success, and my Little White Pineal Gland
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Content:
A 13% approval rating and NOT doing will of the people
The snails have been programmed by the FAKE NEWS
Should congress have known, refusing an audit would result in violence?
Nobody said, let's overturn an election
The reek of bias
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It's all good. It's all about the brainwashing and the mental games, the psychology.
Oh, it's gonna be good.
But first, we'll need the simultaneous sip to get ready for this awesomeness.
Best part of the day. And all you need is a cup or a mug, a glass of tank or gel, just a dine, a canteen, a jug or a plastic vessel of any kind, filled with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine heat of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Yeah, it does. It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go. Yeah, that was good.
So, one of the unintended consequences of the coronavirus and the school shutdowns and all of that is that states are breaking out all over the place trying to assert their ability to allow students to choose where they go to school.
What? The biggest two stories in the country...
In terms of how important they will be to the future, largely ignored.
Are you watching all the headlines about all the movement toward breaking the, let's say, the monopoly that the teachers' unions have on schools?
There's a lot happening.
A lot of states moving forward with saying, hey, let's propose at least funding the students.
So lots of action, lots of proposals.
Imagine if School choice could become real.
Realer, so that you have real school choice for everybody.
That would solve most of our problems.
It would take a big bite out of systemic racism.
Let's say every kid gets a good education, or can.
That takes a lot of problems away, right?
And it's the teachers' unions that prevent that good thing from happening.
But they're having a lot of problems now because they're keeping the schools closed.
And I would guess this will lead to less support for teachers unions and more support for choice.
So that's a gigantic story, if it goes the right way.
Gigantic. Transforms the country, protects us forever.
I mean, it's really big. The other one is that the government, and I don't know what the Trump administration can make permanent, but at least in terms of current priorities, the government has decided to go big on small nuclear reactors to be used for space.
Now, you don't realize yet how big a deal that is.
But if the government has decided that nuclear power is necessary for space, space force, space exploration, space defense, and it is, that means that our domestic industry will get a big boost because they'll do a lot of things in maybe the government sector for military, and that will almost certainly create smaller, cheaper, better new technology companies.
Reactors that might even be safe from meltdown.
So that is something that would affect climate change, no matter what you thought about the actual risk of that.
It will change our whole energy structure.
It changes our defense posture in the future.
Gigantic! You take those two stories.
Just the nuclear energy for space and how that will ripple through everything, and then just the school choice stuff that's springing up everywhere and like lots of little flowers, those are transformative.
Golden age?
Almost. Almost.
Have I told you before that you should expect a demolition phase before rebuilding?
Because there was already stuff here.
The United States already exists.
You don't have a green field where you say, well, imagine we build something from nothing.
You don't have that option. You have to do demolition.
And I feel as if 2020 was a year of demolition.
Now, some of it wasn't our choice, right?
Coronavirus just made us rethink every assumption, which was a really bad pandemic.
But what is the unintended consequence, if you will, of rethinking every assumption?
It's really good.
It's really, really good.
Like, really, really so good you can't even wrap your head around it?
The pandemic is nothing but bad in terms of what it's doing to us at the moment, but making us rethink from scratch every assumption about commuting, what is the nature of school, how do we interact, do we shake hands, I mean just everything.
Medicine, how we deliver medicine, how we make vaccines.
I mean, a lot's changed, but we're still in the middle of the fight.
So when you're in the middle of the fight against the pandemic, that's where your concentration is.
But if you just took a moment, just take a moment to just rise above it a little bit, look at it from 35,000 feet, just get a little distance from it, there is something amazing that is forming.
Now, are there also bad things that we have to watch out for that are forming?
Oh yeah, there are.
Oh yeah. But we'll talk about that too.
It's all optimism today.
I'm feeling good about America.
Part of it is that the things that are going wrong are just sort of funny.
They're sort of laughably funny Problems.
I'll tell you a few of those in a bit.
Apparently, Mike Pompeo, allegedly, he's going to report today that we have dramatic new evidence about the virus allegedly leaking from a Wuhan lab.
But the biggest part of it, the bombshell part, is that the allegation includes the fact that they, quote, cultured the virus.
Now, I don't know what they mean by cultured the virus.
I assume that means it's at least modified or created by humans, right?
So it's at the very least modified.
Now, that would be new information, right?
It's something that we suspected.
It's not something that's ever been confirmed.
But just to make it interesting, Great Britain is saying it's not true.
So Britain says it is not a Credible source of intel and that they don't believe that it has shown that it is a cultured virus or that it even came from the Wuhan lab.
So you've got, allegedly, we haven't seen it yet, but this is the reporting, that Mike Pompeo will say we have new evidence that Wuhan was the source of the leak and that they had cultured the virus so it was at least partially man-human modified, let's say less sexist.
And Great Britain says their intel people say that's not true.
So who are you going to believe?
So you've got our intel agencies as stark contrast to the British intel agencies.
So who do you trust? Which one of them is the credible one?
Neither! Neither!
Our intelligence agencies aren't credible for this kind of story.
There might be some kind of things for which our intelligence agencies are credible by its nature, I suppose.
But this isn't one of them.
If your own intelligence agency tells you something like this, and there's no source and there's no document they can show you, I wouldn't trust it.
This is weapons of mass destruction all over again.
There is zero credibility to the Mike Pompeo story, unless you see it with your own eyes.
If Mike Pompeo goes on TV or whatever and says, we have secret intelligence information that I can't share with you, it means nothing.
You should put zero credibility on that.
Now, what about Great Britain?
If I'm saying there's zero credibility, am I agreeing with Great Britain?
And therefore, Great Britain is the credible one.
No! No!
Great Britain's intelligence agencies are not credible.
Not even a little bit.
In fact, their job is to fool people.
If you're taking as your model of credibility somebody whose entire job is to fool people, well, you're not really smart.
So you have two intelligence agencies on opposite sides of the story, and neither of them have any credibility.
So what do you do with that?
I'm planning to ignore it.
You can make your own decision, but I would say this is a story about no information.
Hello, the breaking headline is today we have no credible information on anything whatsoever.
That's the news.
If you're interpreting it as, hey, I think I just found out something about Wuhan, uh, no.
We don't live in a world where you can trust our intelligence agencies on this kind of question at all.
Like zero is exactly the right amount of trust.
Which doesn't mean it's not true, by the way.
If you think I'm saying it's not true that it escaped from the lab or it's not true that it was cultured, I don't know.
I don't have an opinion on that.
But I know I can't trust anybody else's opinion.
That I know. All right.
So it looks like New York City is canceling their contracts with the Trump Organization for their Their iconic Central Park skating rink and something else.
In retaliation over the MAGA mob Capitol riot, what is the unintended consequence of people punishing the Trump business for something they didn't like about Trump's role as president?
Doesn't that pretty much guarantee that you don't get business people running for president anymore?
Let me ask you.
If I ran for president, should I expect that my income would go up or down?
You already know the answer to that.
It would go down. Anybody who already has some established kind of a business would be crazy to go into politics watching what happened to Trump.
Now, if Trump had gone through his term and simply been loved or hated in whatever degree he was...
And then they just said, okay, but now you go back to your private industry and that's just separate.
Just do what you want to do.
That would be fair. But the moment you make it acceptable...
I mean, New York City's government is doing this in public and bragging about it.
It's not like he's undercover or anything.
They're actually publicly punishing him for his political actions in his business.
Is that the standard you want?
Why would anybody successful run for president if their business will be punished because of their decisions?
Remember, half of the country is going to hate whatever you do.
Why would you go into a situation where half the country is going to put you out of business even if the half loves you?
I wouldn't do it. A number of people have been asking me to run for president.
Partly because the Republicans have no more leadership.
I'm not even a Republican.
That would be sort of the first requirement, I would think, to run for president as a Republican.
I would be an excellent choice, but I'm not crazy enough to take that job.
I can't think of anything that would make me want to do that job.
I mean, I love my country, but I'm not going to walk into a suicide situation.
Don't love it that much.
Let me say that clearly in case you didn't hear it.
I love my country, but I'm not going to intentionally run into a buzzsaw that I don't have to run into.
So I'm not going to run for office.
That would be stupid for me.
Now, if you don't have money, and so you don't have a business to lose, and your life is politics, well, that seems safer.
Here's the funniest story.
You probably saw this if you watched Tucker Carlson or saw some of the video clips.
So Joe Biden so far has the worst start to a presidency I've ever seen.
Now, I've only seen presidents during my lifetime, but I've never seen a worse start.
And here's another example of it.
So not only did he start by calling half of the country a If he did nothing else, that would be the worst start of any presidency.
But it gets better.
He just appointed to the head of Department of Justice Civil Rights Prosecution.
So the person responsible for prosecuting civil rights violations in this country at the federal level, I guess, had once written an article about While she was at Harvard.
So the good news is she went to Harvard.
So when you hear that Biden is putting people in place who went to Harvard, that sounds okay.
At least that's proof that they have high intelligence and are capable of succeeding.
So, so far, so good. But let's see, did she say anything that would be, say, controversial?
Or does she have any history or background saying something that would not make her, let's say, the perfect choice for the head of the Department of Justice civil rights prosecution?
What could that be? Something maybe in that domain that she may have said at some point in the past that would have some relevance to the current job situation?
Because, you know, one of the big Complaints about Trump is that he didn't make good hiring decisions.
Now, I've semi-defended that by saying he didn't have many choices because people didn't want to work for him because of the reputation, so therefore he had a small pool of people who were even willing to take the job.
So that was part of Trump's problem.
And I've also said that he fires better, and firing is the real skill.
When you hire people, you're kind of guessing.
Like, ah, they've never done this exact job, but I feel like they could.
That's sort of guessing.
But when they don't do the job, well, the firing is the skill part.
It's like, okay, pull the trigger.
And he was good at that. Trump's a good firer.
But how's Biden doing?
So he picked somebody for the head of the DOJ civil rights prosecution who had once written a paper saying that black citizens, she happens to be African American, that's important to the story, She says that black people are superior to white people, mentally, physically, and spiritually, and that there's a good reason for that.
It's because their pineal gland doesn't have enough melanin or something.
Now, I don't need to tell you that science does not back her opinion.
I also don't know if she still holds the opinion, because this was a while ago, right?
So if you're in college, you can say some dumb stuff in college.
I don't mind that. And I've suggested the 20-year rule.
The 20-year rule is you just ignore anything that happened 20 years ago.
But that would kind of depend on her disavowing it today.
Yeah, has she ever retracted?
That is exactly the story.
Had she retracted and said, you know, that was just a dumb thing.
It was just a college thing.
I was just being, you know, I was being academic.
I was trying to be provocative.
I don't hold those views.
Now, if she had said that, I would at least attempt to be consistent with my view that the 20-year rule should apply to whatever dumbass racist thing, usually it's racist, but whatever racist or homophobic thing you said 20 years ago, you're probably a different person by now.
And if you're a different person by now, maybe you should be judged by who you are instead of something else.
But what could be funnier than Joe Biden, who is one of his big claims to fame, is that he does good hiring compared to Trump, and he hires somebody who literally says that black people are superior mentally, physically, and spiritually because of some science that isn't real science.
You need to retract that really hard.
I don't know how much of a retraction you'd need to hear to feel that it was real, but I think you'd need a pretty serious retraction on that one.
If she wholeheartedly disavowed her old views, I would still hate it, but I would want to be consistent with my views on Republicans and everybody else, which is, if it was 20 years ago, And you don't hold that view now, I'm going to let it go.
But she hasn't repudiated it, so at the moment it's just, it's hilarious how incompetent this is.
I mean, how incompetent would you have to be to pick this person for that job?
That's like the ultimate presidential incompetence.
And let me tell you, I love being just a critic.
It was so much harder when I was trying to put a You know, the persuasion spin on Trump and say, well, yeah, he said this, but you have to understand how this is going to work out.
That was hard work.
Criticizing Biden for being a dummy is really fun and easy.
So my workload went down about 50%.
Here's some more stupid news.
This is so dumb that when I read it, you're not even going to believe this is true.
But I swear to God, this is true.
You know, there's facial recognition apps now, and law enforcement is using them to figure out, you know, who was in the Capitol and also other stuff.
And apparently the LAPD has announced that they will allow a technology that uses a database of existing mugshots.
So they're okay with using a database of existing mugshots and facial recognition against their small existing database.
Because they only have mugshots.
They don't have everybody else in the world who is not in a mugshot.
But they're not going to use Clearview or tools like it.
Clearview is sort of the leader in terms of accuracy there.
But Clearview has...
Trained its technology, and this is the right phrase, trained its technology on three billion photos.
Now, people think that Clearview stores the photos, like they've scraped them and they've got a database of all the photos.
That didn't happen. Clearview doesn't store any photos.
They have looked at all the photos and turned them into a formula or an algorithm or a mathematical construct.
So what they store is math.
They don't have a photo of you in their database.
They've got math that was a result of your facial features.
So that's all they have, is math.
And then that math becomes a pointer to where on the internet the actual public information is, on Facebook, etc.
So LAPD has decided that they will use facial recognition, but only on a tool that hardly ever works.
So they've decided that they won't use a reliable tool that could find pretty much everybody.
I mean, close to 100%.
So that's evil.
So they're not going to use the evil tool that is 100% effective or near it.
But they will use the evil tool, because it's the same thing.
It's still facial recognition, right?
They will use the one that doesn't work.
Now, that sounds like I made that up, doesn't it?
But we're actually in a world where an entity will announce proudly.
They proudly announced that they will use the tool that is, if I had to put a number on it, maybe 5% as good as Clearview.
But the same technology, not the same technology, but in the sense that they're both facial recognition.
This is actually happening out loud right in front of us.
We choose to use the one that's 5% effective.
It's equally evil. If you think facial recognition is evil, that's what it is.
And they're not hiding it.
It is facial recognition.
But they only want to use the one that doesn't work.
And they said that in public.
What? Somebody says clear view is intrusive.
Well, it's facial recognition that works.
It's only more intrusive than other things because it works better.
That's the only thing that makes it different.
Anyway, I thought that was funny.
Scientists have done an experiment with snails, and they found that they can make the snail remember something that never happened.
Do you know what else never happened?
Scientists making snails remember something that never happened.
I don't think I have to actually read the story to know that whatever a snail remembers, I don't know if you can test that.
But let's say they taught the snails to do something if they saw something they'd seen before.
So maybe there's a way you can test false memories that way.
But I thought, that's not really the story, that you can make a snail believe something that didn't happen.
You know what the story is?
The fake news does that literally every day.
Are you surprised that scientists working really hard can fool a snail?
I'm not really surprised.
Because 75% of the people I interacted with on Twitter today also are operating under false memories.
They were implanted by the fake news, and it's quite obvious.
You just read their opinion, you go, oh, you got that one from the fake news, that's not real.
It's exactly like the snail.
What kind of a grant did we do to find out that scientists can give snails fake news and they'll believe it?
Because if you can do it to a living human being, easily and effectively and consistently, are you really surprised you can do it to a snail?
I'm just saying there are some sciences more useful than others.
Here's a question I have.
In my attempt to get as close to cancellation as I can without actually getting cancelled.
I don't want to get cancelled, by the way.
And I will intentionally do things to make sure I don't go far enough that that's likely.
But I'm not sure it's up to me because all it would take is one.
What would it take to get me cancelled?
If I don't do anything wrong, what would it take to get me cancelled?
Snail false memory.
Right. All it takes is the fake news to tell the snails that they have a false memory of me doing something.
Is that hard?
Nope. It's real easy.
I'll give you some examples in a bit where the fake news is actively telling people to remember something that didn't happen.
It's happening right now. It's actually the headline.
The main news right now is the snails.
It's just that you're the snails.
And the news is telling you something that didn't happen, and it has become a memory.
I'm going to tell you in a moment a memory that at least half the country has, maybe three quarters, an actual memory that didn't happen.
We'll get to that in a minute.
So if you think you're different than the snail, hold on for that.
So here's a question that I ask provocatively.
If the mega...
Protesters, if they were all MAGA, who knows, that assaulted the Capitol.
If they were planning a violent assault, meaning that they planned a violent overthrow with universal violence as opposed to there were members of the group who definitely were violent and literally killed people, or at least one.
So there definitely were violent people there who went there to be violent.
But here's the question I have.
The MAGA people were armed to the teeth.
Some of them were.
Right? And if you looked at the number of guns owned by the people who attended, probably most did not take their weapons.
But the amount of them that attended who owned weapons, and I'm not talking about clubs, I'm talking about actual guns, are you a little bit surprised that That there was an insurrection of the most gun-owning people on the earth.
I think that's true. Wouldn't Republicans be maybe among or the most gun-owning people on earth?
And none of them shot anybody.
Am I right? Have you heard any story of a MAGA person even aiming a weapon at another human?
Now I don't know that it didn't happen, but I haven't heard the story about it.
There's no reporting on it.
All of those weapons, all of those weapons, thousands of them that they had access to, some of them actually brought weapons, not one person brandished a weapon as in aiming it at somebody.
Now what kind of an insurrection is that when the people with massive weaponry Don't bring it.
And the ones that brought it didn't even attempt to use it.
What do you call that?
Well, we'll get into that.
Here's what I'd call it.
The fake news has sold you on the idea that there was a coup attempt and or an insurrection.
So those words used not exactly the same as each other, but I think the coup attempt is a little more, let's say, organized because it assumes that there's somebody you're putting in charge, whereas an insurrection, maybe it's less organized.
I don't know. Or maybe they're the same.
It doesn't matter for my purposes.
But here's what got lost in the story, and this is how all of the snails will be reprogrammed.
What Ted Cruz and the other Republicans were asking for was not, quote, overthrowing the election.
But how is it being reported?
It's being reported that those senators were, quote, trying to overturn an election.
Did Ted Cruz ever say, I would like to overturn this election?
Nope. How about Josh Hawley?
Did he say, I would like to overturn the election?
Nope. Nope.
There wasn't a single person who said, let's overturn the election, at least not in Congress.
Not a single person. Did Trump say, let's overturn the election?
Nope. Nope.
Don't know anybody who knows that.
All I know is Ted Cruz saying, let's use 10 days for an audit.
We have 10 days.
It won't slow anything down.
It won't change the outcome unless we found out something we don't know.
And wouldn't it make the whole country feel more confident in the process?
So, Congress was trying to take an election that did not have credibility with enough of the public to be, you know, really called a high-class, quality, credible election.
Now, it might have been fair and free.
How would I know? I don't have any direct evidence that I have access to.
I only have news reports.
So, it might have been fair enough and free enough.
But it is still a fact that half the country-ish doesn't believe it was as fair as it should have been.
So when you've got senators like Ted Cruz, who I believe is a genuine patriot, and Josh Howley, genuine patriot, and the others, Matt Gaetz, etc., when they're asking for 10 days to improve the reliability and credibility of an election, that's not just for Republicans.
That's for everybody.
Is there one of you who would not be better off with a more transparent election?
Well, I mean, you can make an argument if it changed the result of who got in office and you liked Biden more than you liked Trump.
Then yeah, maybe. But wouldn't you be better off with a system that works?
Wouldn't you be better off knowing that the election worked?
The fake news has brainwashed the public into thinking this was an actual coup.
To which I ask you this provocative question.
If this were a coup attempt, as opposed to trying to force Congress to have a 10-day audit and have some transparency, which the public required, if it were a real coup, how exactly was that coup going to work?
Did they think, these clever coup plotters, that once they had occupied two empty rooms...
That they were then the leaders of the country?
Was that their thinking?
Once we get in these empty rooms with all this furniture, we run the country now.
Is that what they thought?
Because I don't think so.
I don't think they thought that.
Did they think that by stealing the magic lectern, which did happen, Nancy's lectern was stolen, were they thinking...
If we can get a hold of the magic golden lectern, we will have power over the whole world?
I don't think they thought that.
It looked more like they were getting souvenirs.
So, let me ask you this.
If I said to you, there are some senators who want more transparency in the election so that we can be sure we had a solid election...
And that's better than the situation we have with great uncertainty.
Does that sound like a coup?
Is a coup where you take the existing system and try to improve it as it stands?
That is the opposite of a coup.
If you're trying to make the current system work better transparently, which is all they asked for, just an audit, you're doing the opposite of a coup.
A coup is changing that system and changing the outcome.
Now, could an outcome change?
Yes, but only if the system worked.
The only way the outcome could change is if the system were repaired through transparency.
We can see what happened with an audit.
And if, and we don't know, that would be the case, and if that repairing of the transparency caused a re-vote or some re-evaluation, that could happen.
But It's the opposite of a coup when you're trying to make sure the public feels confident with the existing system.
Changing the existing system is the coup.
So when these people came in there and they were obviously trying to intimidate Congress, so some people said to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, what you don't understand is, no, it's not about stealing the golden lectern so you have power and It's not about them thinking that a coup could be accomplished by fully occupying two empty rooms.
They didn't think that.
They were trying to bully and intimidate and scare Congress into doing something, and that's bad.
That is bad.
Except, what exactly was it they were trying to bully and scare and threaten Congress into doing?
Was it...
Were they trying to bully and scare and threaten Congress into doing something illegal?
No, no, they weren't trying to get them to do anything illegal.
Were they trying to threaten Congress into doing something that their own rules of Congress wouldn't allow them to do?
No, no, Congress could have done what the protesters wanted.
They could do an audit.
In fact, Ted Cruz had suggested it.
So, wouldn't you say that the Congress was being threatened and bullied into doing the job?
Because I would say that if half of the country feels there's no credibility in the election, and they have 10 days to do something that might make a difference, and you want them to do that thing, which can be done, it's practical, It wouldn't change anything in terms of the timing.
And it's their job.
You actually had an insurrection to try to force Congress just to do its job.
That actually happened.
And that's being presented as a coup attempt and an insurrection.
It's literally the opposite.
It was an insurrection...
Mostly, right? There were some bad elements in there who had their own, they must have had their own motives.
So I'm not trying to minimize the fact that there were some bad people in that group.
And what those bad people did, they have to be held fully accountable for.
You know, it's illegal.
You could execute them for all I care.
Especially the one who beat the cop.
Anybody who beat that cop, you could execute them.
I'm fine with that. Assuming it's legal.
But I'm just saying that the mass, the far majority of these people that are being called the insurrection and the coup were literally trying to intimidate Congress into doing its job for the first fucking time.
And that's being called a coup.
Right? Encouraging Congress to just simply do its job.
That's it. They didn't ask them to do something that's not their job.
They didn't ask them to quit.
None of that. They just asked them to do their job.
That's it. Now, you could argue that maybe they shouldn't have done their job that way, etc.
But you can't argue what the intent was.
Because if the intent was a coup, I think they would use some weapons.
If the intent was an insurrection, like an actual change of government based on their threats or their actual violence...
Would they do it that way?
What kind of a weak-ass coup takes over two empty rooms, steals a lectern, and says, I think we got this.
I think we're in charge of the United States now.
That's not a thing.
That's what the fake news sold to the snails.
The snails believe there was a coup.
And they will never believe anything else.
Because the snails have been programmed by the fake news to To think that instead of a bunch of people taking a body of the government, the Congress, which had, what, a 13% approval rating?
Let me tell you, if patriots surround a part of the government that has a 13% rating of approval, And they're refusing to do the most basic part of their job, which is, hey, could you maybe give us some assurance that the election was fair?
Pretty basic to the job, I would say.
If they're not willing to do their job, and they have 13% approval, whose fault is it that patriots surrounded their building The bad ones went inside.
We don't condone that whatsoever.
Totally disavow the ones who went inside.
But you should expect that they're going to surround the building.
You should expect a free speech kind of demonstration.
I mean, if you didn't expect that...
So Trump will either be impeached or almost impeached based on the fact that That although his words did not encourage violence and specifically said the opposite, he said be peaceful, specifically be peaceful,
but I do think it's a fair criticism that he should have known what would happen even though his words were not telling them to do that.
It wouldn't have been too hard to know that you're creating a dangerous situation.
So I think he has to take responsibility for that the same way he can take credit for some of the great things he did.
But if it's true that Trump could be impeached or almost impeached because he should have known, it's not what he did intentionally, it's what he should have known would have been the result, even though his specific actions didn't have that tell for a problem.
He should have known. That his actions would have caused that.
I agree with that. But, should Congress have known that denying an audit under this condition would create violence?
Yeah. You just got quiet, didn't you?
Should Congress have known that not backing the audit, which there was no problems with it, didn't have a budget problem, Didn't have a timing problem.
There was no objection to it.
It could have been done.
Should Congress have known that this would cause violence?
Abso-fucking-lutely they should have known.
And all I ask is for some consistency.
I will not push back on attempts to impeach Trump over this.
Because I do think he's got something to answer for.
All leaders have to answer for the result of their actions, right?
The fact that he wasn't intending this to happen matters, but it doesn't excuse it, right?
Because you can be impeached for a mistake.
I would say it was a mistake.
It was a big one. It was a big mistake.
But it wasn't intentional.
Do you think that Trump wanted violence?
I think that's the last thing he wanted.
I think that's the very last thing he wanted.
It's obvious that he wanted pressure on Congress, but pressure to do an audit.
Not pressure to overturn the election.
Not pressure to enter the building.
There's no way Trump wanted that.
But buck stops at the top.
You know, if I'm going to be even a little bit consistent, the person in charge gets the blame.
And the person in charge gets the credit if things go right, even if they weren't directly involved.
Those are the rules, and I don't think we should change them.
I'm not going to change it for Trump.
But I want to be consistent.
Kamala Harris was promoting violence by the Black Lives Matter protesters.
I think that should be treated the same.
So I can support impeaching Trump over this, even understanding, in my opinion, that he didn't intend any of it to happen.
But the same way Kamala Harris actually actively supported...
I'll say unrest.
I won't say violence. She didn't use that word.
But she was certainly in favor of unrest, which guaranteed death and destruction.
Guaranteed it. And of course, she would know that.
So how does Kamala Harris not get impeached?
It's the same standard.
And secondly, how do all of the members of Congress...
Who voted against the 10-day audit, how in fuck did they not know that they were going to get attacked for that?
How the fuck did they not know that was going to cause that problem?
Right? Same standard.
All right, let me read this comment.
The coup insurrection false narrative is beyond annoying.
Yeah. How the Dems used it against...
Yeah, right.
That comment disappeared for reasons that I'm not clear as I was reading it.
But thank you for the comment. So, how do you feel living among the snails who have been convinced that an attempt to solidify and protect the republic as it stands has been turned by the fake news into a coup attempt and an insurrection...
Where plainly it wasn't.
Plainly. You don't need to be an expert on insurrections.
You just have to look at it and say, they took over a room.
You can't control a country by taking over a room.
An empty room?
Now, some of you are saying, but they meant to take members of Congress hostage.
Let's say that's true. There was a guy there with twist ties, right, that showed some intent.
But let's say, worst case scenario, that some of the people who are in the building intended to harm or take control of, let's say, members of Congress.
Do you know what's wrong with this?
How could you control the United States by taking hostage any number of people who have a 13% approval rating and are not doing the will of the people?
I do not condone any kind of hostage-taking.
I hope that's obvious.
I don't condone any violence, and I absolutely disavow anybody who entered the building.
They should have stayed out of the building, period.
But if you're going to say this was a coup attempt, you have to complete the story.
I'm just asking anybody who thinks it was a coup to complete the story.
And the story is, if they took hostages in Congress, Would they control the country?
No! No!
Not even a little bit.
Name a member of Congress that we wouldn't sacrifice as opposed to overthrowing the government of the United States.
I'm a big fan of Mike Pence, even though he's very unpopular with a lot of people this week.
I've been saying since the beginning that if you judge him For his job as a vice president, spectacular.
I really think he's one of the strongest vice presidents we've ever had, even though I disagree with him on LGBTQ stuff and other stuff.
So I don't think he should be president.
But as a vice president, damn good.
Now, as much as I like Mike Pence, imagine, if you will, if the alleged coup attempt people had taken him hostage and were planning to kill him, If they didn't get their way, then do the coup attempt people, have they taken over the country?
Would that work? Hey, we got your vice president.
We're going to do bad things to him unless you let us run the country or put Trump in charge and let Trump have a second term.
Would that work? No!
No! We might love Mike Pence, but we're not going to trade his life for the country.
That's not how it works.
We would say, well, if that's the way it's got to be, you know, we're going to miss Mike Pence.
There isn't a single person in the world who would trade the country for Mike Pence, and Mike Pence is awesome, great guy, you know, overall.
I know some of you think he's a traitor for not wanting to vote the way he did, etc.
I think he's a good person who's just trying to figure out the best option and of bad options.
I just see him as a good person.
You don't have to agree with him.
I don't either.
I don't agree with all of his decisions.
But I feel like he's a good person.
Still. Still.
If one person in our government is taken hostage...
We're not going to overthrow the government.
Turn it to the president, whoever the president is.
You could pick Trump or Biden or anybody else.
Bad people take the president hostage sometime in the future.
Do they own the country?
No! No!
Not even a little bit. Not even slightly.
You could take every member of Congress hostage, and it wouldn't have any effect on controlling the country.
Because the rest of the country would say, oh, well, I guess we need some new politicians.
And we would just go on like it didn't even happen.
We would, of course, kill all the coup people first.
But it wouldn't stop us.
There's no way that any of those actions, conceivably in the most wild imagination, could have turned into anything like a coup.
There was just no...
No connecting tissue that could have made that even slightly possible.
Not 1%, nothing.
And yet the snails have been convinced it happened.
All right. Glenn Beck's getting in trouble for referring to the private company social media censorship of some voices as a digital holocaust.
And then the people who, like the Auschwitz Museum people, etc., Say, stop using our Holocaust analogies because you're trivializing the Holocaust.
I have two things to say about that.
Number one, don't compare things to the Holocaust.
The whole point of the Holocaust is that it can't be compared to other things.
Unless it's another Holocaust.
Like if somebody actually kills six million people of some identified group, well yeah, that's the Holocaust.
But I don't call censorship and stuff like that a Holocaust, right?
It does cheapen the Holocaust.
So I agree that it's a word that...
There are some words you want to preserve, right?
You just want to preserve some words and not water down their meaning because they're important.
But here's the fun part and the second part.
Having suffered from four years of Hitler analogies about Trump...
I really did kind of enjoy that Glenn Beck is making a legitimate...
It's legitimate. I mean, it's as legitimate as the charges against Trump for being Hitler, meaning neither of them are legitimate, because nothing really compares to Hitler, nothing compares to the Holocaust.
It's just hyperbole.
But it's completely fair that after four years of listening to it, you want to send a little back...
I kind of enjoyed that.
And I have to tell you, when it was obvious that Trump wasn't going to get a second term, I suffered a little bit of, not depression, nothing like that, but maybe a little bit of pre-sadness that I wouldn't be entertained in the future.
Wouldn't be fun things to talk about, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
So making fun of Biden will be way more entertaining than defending Trump, because it'll be so easy.
John Dvorak wrote a really provocative article talking about how the poor countries, I was talking about this yesterday, How the countries with low income seem to be doing better on the coronavirus than the countries with good health care systems.
And I was speculating, we don't know why that is.
Maybe it's sunshine or bad reporting or any one of ten things or ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
Everybody's got their own private theory.
But John Dvorak's theory is the most provocative of them all.
And I'm not telling you I agree with this.
I'm just going to tell you his opinion because it's so fun.
And his opinion is it's mass hysteria.
That the countries that have a, let's say, a well-developed news social media industry, they've generated a mass hysteria so that our impression of what's happening is way out of line with what's happening.
And that the poor countries don't have the same, you know, robust social media, fake news kind of influence, and so they don't know that they're in a pandemic.
And the hypothesis, and again, this is not my opinion.
I'm going to tell you my opinion in a moment.
But the hypothesis is that mass hysteria is so strong that if you get enough of it going, it looks like you have a pandemic...
Well, maybe you don't. Now, part of his argument is we don't see bodies piled up in these third-world countries, and that's a mystery, right?
If these other countries are doing everything wrong, at least according to the developed countries, they are, because they don't have all the high-quality health care, if they're doing everything wrong, where are the bodies?
Right? Wouldn't we notice?
I mean, even though we don't have great information about what's happening in Congo or some African country, we don't have great information, but wouldn't we notice by now?
There'd be a lot of dead people.
Maybe there are.
We just haven't noticed.
That would be weird. Somebody says they bury them.
Yeah, but you'd still notice.
I mean, they'd be talking about it.
So... I don't think I quite buy into John's theory only because we do have bodies piled up.
If you count the number of people who seem to have died, if you look at the impact on ICUs where there's a hot space, it looks like real disease to me.
It looks real to me.
So there may be some way that John Dvorak's opinion about the mass hysteria Or at least a hypothesis.
Let's say it's a hypothesis as opposed to an opinion.
I don't want to oversell his opinion.
He needs to do that himself.
But let's call it a hypothesis.
It's really interesting.
And the part of the hypothesis I like, and the thing that makes it provocative, is that it's entirely possible for a mass hysteria to cause people to think they're having health problems or not.
But I don't think that's happening in this case, because I think there are too many doctors looking at too many real things and too many real patients.
But you never know. It's just a fun thought.
Let's see. I'd like to give a random compliment today.
I told you I'd be giving out random compliments, especially to people who you don't expect me to be complimenting.
Today's compliment is to Geraldo Rivera.
Yeah, I know. I know what you're going to say.
Hold on. Just hold on.
It's not as bad as you think.
You can handle this.
I know you can. So Geraldo, of course, has been quite brutal on the president, Trump.
Who have been friends for a long time.
So Geraldo's been a booster overall, but he's, you know, disagreed on immigration and some other things.
So here's what he said in a tweet.
He said, regardless of how Senate ultimately votes, I think he's talking about impeachment.
He says it's entirely appropriate that Trump be impeached by the House.
He knew what the mob intended from the jump, and basically that's his point.
He knew what they were going to do, so it's on him.
And he goes after Trump pretty hard.
Now here's my compliment to Geraldo.
Yes, he took a selfie with his shirt off over the age of 70.
Yes, Capone's vault did not go the way maybe he hoped.
Yes, he does do a lot of self-promotion.
That's his job. So do I. If you do this for a living, you do a lot of self-promotion.
It's sort of what you do.
That is part of the job.
But here's what I love about Geraldo and the following compliment.
Geraldo doesn't give a shit what you think about his opinion.
And I could not love that more.
He... That more people disagree with and said it, you know, with complete bravery, I guess, would be the right thing.
He is one brave mofo.
He will say absolutely anything he thinks is true, no matter what you think of it, and he'll say it in public.
And there are not many people like that.
Now, I don't agree with Geraldo on a number of things.
You know, I've been watching him for a long time.
Sometimes I like him, his opinion, sometimes I disagree.
But in every case, don't you feel he's telling you his honest opinion?
That's the special part.
It looks like, I mean, you can't read minds, but my opinion of his opinion is that every time he gives it, I'm seeing an actual opinion.
When you watch almost anybody else who's in this business, and I think I could put myself in that category, unfortunately, you can smell the bias, right?
Like it just reeks.
Some people just reek of bias even when they're saying things that are true.
They still reek of bias.
Geraldo does not.
He does not reek of bias.
He can take a position on the left when it looks like it makes sense to him.
Even if I disagree. And he can take a position on the right if he thinks it makes sense.
That is special, right?
You need more of Geraldo even if you disagree with him.
You don't need less of that.
You need a lot more of it, in my opinion.
Stephen Beschloss, a historian, I believe, He tweeted that after the grim week, I was talking about some members of Congress, tried to come to work with a concealed carry, I guess, and they felt that they needed it for their safety, and they set off the, I guess, the security alarms, and they refused to be patted down.
Now, I didn't hear the rest of the story, whether they were let in or not, But apparently they were strapped and they had weapons.
Now, Beschloss says that maybe I shouldn't be surprised by the disgraceful level of arrogance of congresspeople who refuse to go through a metal detector, arrogance and selfishness, qualities that helped us get into this mess.
To which I say, Stephen, Did you notice that Congress was just invaded by armed people with twist ties?
I feel as though Congress has a right to defend themselves.
It's called the Constitution.
And I don't think we should ask them to go to work in that environment without feeling safe.
And if what it takes for them to feel safe is their Second Amendment rights, who has more Second Amendment rights than a congressperson?
Ideally, we all have the same rights, but be serious.
They've got extra rights because they're in Congress.
They shouldn't have, but they do. And I completely back 100% the Congress people who wanted to be armed.
If you put me in a situation where my personal security was as loose and tentative as apparently the security is for the Capitol building...
I would want to... I would have a concealed carry.
Because who was going to stop the...
You know, if they got in, who was going to stop them?
It looks like the police were standing aside.
I'd want to be armed. So I'll back the people who tried to be armed for that.
I made a prediction here that the odds of Democrats permanently shutting Republicans out of power...
And that's the worry.
The worry is that they have so much power now, they'll be changing the voting districts and they'll be adding the District of Columbia and they'll get rid of the filibuster and they'll pack the courts and everything.
So the worry is that the Democrats will just have this firm, permanent control on power.
Maybe. Maybe.
That's definitely one of the things that could happen.
But if you're looking at the odds, I would say the odds of Democrats self-destructing is way higher.
If you're going to look at the next election, I don't feel like it looks good for Democrats already.
Because the Democrats will have to either not do the things they promised, such as opening the border, or they have to do the things they promised and watch a disaster unfold.
Because if you open the border...
I don't feel like there are two ways that could go.
I feel like that's one of those few situations where you don't have to guess which way it's going to go.
It would be a humanitarian disaster, I would imagine.
I don't see how it could go any other way.
But this is all by way of saying, if you're worried that the Democrats have a stranglehold on power, I think they're self-destructing.
Because when they were out of power, at least the presidency, they had the luxury of saying crazy stuff and not having to do any of it.
Now, if they say crazy stuff, they're either going to disappoint because they don't do it, or they're going to do it and show that none of their plans work.
That's all that's left.
They don't have a path to success.
Because if you're thinking, well, they'll get in there and they'll shut down the Republicans and...
And they'll do good work.
Because if they do those two things, they'd have power forever.
Do a good job, shut down the Republicans, permanent situation.
But I don't think so.
I mean, anything's possible.
But it looks like Democrats are going to self-destruct just by...
I mean, look at that appointment of Kristen Clark, the woman who had the 20-year-old or whatever claim about the pineal gland making black people superior.
He appointed that woman.
That's the kind of action we're going to see out of a Biden administration.
It's literally laughably stupid.
It's just laughably stupid.
Now, I'm sure all Democrats thought that of everything that Trump did, but that's my point.
My point is that being in power is hard.
Being a critic, which I am right now, Where I just get to criticize people for whatever the hell they're doing.
Real easy. I just move from the hardest job in the world to the easiest.
Not really feeling any pain at the moment.
Alright. Yeah, there is stupidity on all sides of the aisles.
I believe that is what I wanted to talk about today.
Should the Trump wing of Republicans form a new party?
No. Now, if the Republicans want any hope of ever getting power back, they need to be one party.
The reason it worked with Trump is that he managed to do the near impossible, which is he unified the Republican Party.
So, no, I don't think you want to start another party.
What are the chances of 2024 having auditable elections?
I would say zero. Zero.
As far as I can tell, there is no interest in the government, not real interest.
There are people talking, but there doesn't seem to be any real interest in fixing the election system.
Have you seen it? I don't see Biden saying, I'm going to make this my highest priority to make this auditable.
I don't see any chance this can happen.
So I'm seeing a question about the Patrick Byrne story.
I think that's the story about Italy being somehow involved in fixing the election.
So my take on that, just quickly, I've talked about that before.
My take is that Patrick Byrne is like a really smart guy.
If you look into his background and credentials, he's super smart.
And successful, too.
So you've got that on one hand.
Super smart and successful person making a claim.
But the claim is of a nature that I don't believe ever.
So the claim is sufficiently fantastical that I dismiss it as sort of a Bigfoot kind of a claim.
Which doesn't mean it's not true.
I'm just saying that if you were going to look at claims that sort of have that vibe, you know, it's complicated and you can't see...
Nobody's showing you the direct evidence.
It's people who talk to people about a complicated scheme and another country.
Anytime a story has all of those qualities to it, you should bet against it.
So if I had to bet, 10 to 1 odds is bullshit, if I had to bet.
But that's 10 to 1.
Is there a 10% chance it's real?
Yeah, maybe. Maybe 10% chance.
Remember, I've told you that any individual claim is almost certainly false, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a big system that involves software, and the odds of a big, important system that involves software not being hacked is zero.
Now, I don't know if it was hacked this year.
I don't know if the hacks, if they happened, changed any results.
I don't know if there were just as many hacks for Trump as against him.
I don't know if there were any hacks.
I just know that this system has to be hacked eventually.
It's either happened, is happening, or will happen.
That's the guarantee. Because all systems get hacked.
All you need is an insider to be willing to take a bribe.
That's all it takes. Somebody says it looks more real than other claims.
I don't think so. I don't think it's more real than the ones who have been debunked.
On the surface. I don't know what the reality is, just on the surface.
It doesn't look real. There are no techies explaining the vote switching yet.
The whole vote switching thing, I just saw a reference to none of that being real because I guess the TV reporting...
And I can't claim this to be true, it's just something I saw on the internet, that the way the TV reports the votes as they come in is estimates.
And so as new information comes in to change their estimate, it is actually completely normal and built into the system that since they're estimates, sometimes they go up a little and sometimes they go down a little, but on average they mostly go up.
So it would have happened to both candidates, and there's no story here except the estimates we're showing on the screen, which you interpreted to be actual votes.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but if you told me which is more true, that version that those numbers were not dependable and they were just estimates, or that right in front of us votes were being taken from one candidate and given to another, On national TV while you could watch it.
Maybe. Maybe that happened.
But I would bet against that.
I would bet against that you could watch it happen in real time and it was just on television.
It feels a lot more likely that they were working with estimates that were being updated and sometimes they went backwards but not usually.
Somebody says we saw it happen.
What I'm telling you is you didn't.
You didn't see it happen.
What I'm telling you is that if the alternate explanation is correct, and I don't know if it is, but if the alternate explanation is that you saw estimates, then no, you did not see the vote count decreasing.
You saw estimates, which of course will move back and forth as new information comes in.
Dr. Sheev has one part of election fraud in Massachusetts court.
I don't know that story, but I'll be interested in it.
You think it was major vote harvesting?
Yeah, Benford's Law, somebody saying that's been debunked.
So one of the problems is that a lot of things that you heard as claims, you did not hear the debunk.
And I felt that problem too, and I complained about it.
There should have always been some master list of all the allegations, along with what was at least presented as a debunk, whether it was real or not.
So if you've never heard that the Benford's Law thing was debunked, ask yourself if you're getting good information, because it was debunked.
All right. That's all I got for now.
And somebody says, Benford's Law is not debunked, it's just not definitive.
I think that's an accurate statement, but doesn't really disagree with debunked.
Meaning that there's a claim that rather than saying, yeah, this is really strong evidence of something, it just means you can't tell.
So I would call that debunked, but I accept your clarification.
That's all I got for you.
And I'll talk to you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers, I don't have much else to say.
Yeah, Benfords is an invitation to investigate, right?
It would be good to have an audit so all of these things are aired out.
Matthias says, this was a horrible periscope.
I give a zero out of one.
I'm going to put you out of your misery.
We'll hide you on this channel.
I need a micro lesson on finishing projects.
I might do that one, actually.
I've gotten a few requests for something in that category.
