Episode 1331 Scott Adams: How I Become President, Mind Readers Send People to Jail, Infrastructure and More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Are Vaccination Passports racist?
Lester Holt says fairness is overrated
How I'd win the Presidency
Redesigning key American government systems
Matt Gaetz story gets weirder and weirder
Black Americans and Republicans distrust government
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All of you Periscope refugees, hey Jeff, come on in.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, now exclusively, at least today, on YouTube.
Periscope is no more.
I'll be looking at my options for increasing my platform potential.
So I'll be looking at Rumble, and I'll be looking at something called HAPS, H-A-P-P-S dot TV, and looking at some other stuff.
And I'll let you know if I get on any other platforms.
But for now, it's YouTube alone.
At some point, the locals platform will have streaming.
Don't know exactly when, but it shouldn't be too long.
But if you'd like to enjoy this livestream, To the maximum.
And let me tell you, this one's going to be a good one.
I mean, I say that all the time.
And it's true every time.
This one's going to be a good one.
But all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, junk or flowers, confess a little of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Well, I hate to do a commercial for YouTube, but I'm going to, because I saw a question there that suggests that you don't have to see advertisements if you're a paid subscriber to YouTube.
Now, Why would you want to be a paid subscriber to YouTube?
To get rid of the ads.
Now, I don't know if anybody has discovered this yet.
But I find that I can't watch a movie anymore.
It's just impossible.
Because it's just people I don't know.
It's way too long.
It makes me sad intentionally.
It's meant to make you sad before it makes you happy.
Sometimes it just leaves you sad.
So movies don't really make any sense as an entertainment medium anymore.
To me. Same with TV shows.
They just don't have the scripted TV shows.
They just don't have any pop.
And you don't often have an hour or even half an hour to just sit there and do one thing.
But the thing that YouTube has Is that you can get exactly what you want and just watch a bunch of it.
So I think I've told you that I'm hooked on watching Norm MacDonald clips.
There are lots of them.
And you can just line them up and it's one Norm MacDonald clip after another where he's on some show or other and saying something funny.
And I could watch that all day long.
But there's no movie, right?
There's no movie of individual Norm MacDonald funny clips.
You can only get that on YouTube.
So, given your attention span changes, if it's like me, your attention span has shrunk to the point where if something's more than two to ten minutes long, it just isn't interesting anymore.
It's just too long.
So, YouTube is absolutely worth the subscription.
I hate to do a commercial for them, but it's one of the few things I can say with complete confidence that it is the best entertainment option in the world.
If you get rid of the commercials.
There's nothing even close at this point.
So April Fools, everybody.
I hope you see my pinned tweet.
I won't say anything else about that.
But I've got a pinned tweet you want to see today.
So in my ongoing series called The Left Eats Itself, we have at least three new entries.
The first entry is my favorite.
As you know, the Washington Post seems to lean left, as in pro-Biden.
Washington Post, of course, owned by Jeff Bezos.
So, thanks to the good work of Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, in part, Biden is president, and he's just announced that one of his top priorities is to raise taxes on Amazon.com.
By name.
He calls them out specifically to massively increase their taxes.
So, do you think Jeff Bezos is a little bit closer to being a Republican today?
Just a little bit closer to being a Republican?
Because somebody do the math for me.
If Biden gets his way with a, what is it, 21% minimum corporate tax, take Amazon's profits, I don't know what they are, Probably a big number.
Take their profits and multiply by.21 and tell me how much Jeff Bezos gave away by supporting Biden.
So that's the first example of the left eats itself.
Number two, Georgia passed some voting laws, which the left says are restrictive, the right says are just ordinary common sense, such as requiring ID. And so Hollywood is being pressured to boycott them.
Except Hollywood really likes Georgia because they have a really good environment.
They have the right kind of weather.
I mean, they're really optimized for making movies.
And if you take that away, Hollywood spends a lot more money and has a lot less of maybe a weather situation.
It could be worse. So the left cancels Georgia, which turns out to be really bad for Hollywood.
Is it bad for Georgia?
Well, we'll find out.
Could be. But the left is eating itself.
Did I check out Decentraland?
I did not, yet.
Just looking at your comments.
Now, here's my latest one.
The left eats itself.
One of the biggest issues of left and right is whether ID is required for voting, right?
So let's just take that fact.
Should ID be required for voting?
And the left says, No, that's racist.
Because there are so many black Americans, the group I identify with.
I've told you that I identify black now because as an affinity, I have more in common with that group, so I just identify black now.
With respect. No joke at all.
With respect, complete respect, I identify black now.
That's not a joke, by the way.
Everybody who's going to be laughing will say, you're playing a prank.
It's not April Fool's.
I just identify with the group.
And I have that right, and I'm going to express that right.
Because if it were not an option, we wouldn't be talking about it.
But it is an option, so I take it.
But anyway, voter ID, say the left, is racist because it would leave a lot of black people unable to vote, which sounds pretty bad.
But then there's this other question in the news about vaccine passports.
And here's the thing.
How could you have a vaccine passport without ID? Because wouldn't you have the same racist problem?
All the folks who don't have identification, it wouldn't matter if they got a vaccination or not, because later they wouldn't be able to prove it.
Because they could prove that somebody by a certain name got a vaccination, But they can't prove that that's them.
They have no ID. So it doesn't matter if you're on the list that says, Scott Adams got a vaccination.
When I show up at the wherever it is that I need to show ID, they say, prove you're that person.
I can't. I can't prove I'm the person who got the vaccination.
I don't have ID. So, again, the left is eating itself.
Because it's created this sort of weird belief that black people should not be, let's say, compelled to get ID or go without the benefits of ID. Now, they have their argument, and I won't even say it's a good or bad argument because that's not necessary for my point.
My point is, you do need a little consistency, right?
Right? You can be right, you can be wrong.
That's just normal. We're not all so smart that we're right all the time.
But there is an expectation of consistency, right?
So if you're going to say that it's racist to require ID for voting, it's definitely racist to require a vaccine passport.
Because all the people with no ID are still left out.
Now you might say to yourself, Scott, how many people are we talking about?
How many people who don't have an ID, but let's say they do get vaccinated somehow?
I'm sure the homeless and people without IDs are getting vaccinated somehow.
You know, not in the same places, but somehow.
Are there a lot of people who did get vaccinated And they need to go somewhere where that vaccination passport matters.
But they probably would have needed ID anyway.
So it's not many people.
But that doesn't change the point.
It doesn't matter how many are involved, right?
Nobody said that racism doesn't count if it's not a large number of people.
It's still racism. Same stuff.
So there's that.
Lester Holt, NBC News.
Recently said that I think it's become clear that fairness is overrated.
The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in.
Now here's the funny part about that.
I agree with him totally.
Not only do I agree with Lester Holt totally, but so do you.
Now you might say you don't, but you do.
You do. You know that in order to be in the news business, you have to decide what's worth being on TV or in the news.
You can't abdicate that responsibility.
So if somebody says a volcano happened and it's...
The natural forces.
And somebody else says, no, it's an alien volcano ray and we're under-attacked by an alien force from outer space.
Does Lester Holt need to show the other side of the argument?
Oh, some people say it's natural for a volcano.
But the other side says it's a space alien volcano ray that caused it.
No. There's not a single person in the world Who says that Lester Holt needs to report about the alien space ray?
Nobody, right?
So his statement is 100% true.
And I think he's talking about stuff like Q, right?
But here's the problem.
How good is Lester Holt, or let's say the news anchors, how good are they at knowing what's true?
Or what's even worthy to report?
Because they reported every hoax that we've ever talked about.
The Charlottesville hoax, the drinking bleach hoax.
So the people who can't tell a hoax from reality, and that's not a claim that's really an opinion, is it?
Is that even an opinion?
When I state that the people who are the major news people We know for sure that they can't tell the difference between an obvious hoax, a really obvious one, like the drinking bleach hoax and the Charlottesville thing.
Those are really obvious.
They couldn't tell the difference.
So, while I do accept the concept that they do need to make these judgments, it can't be ignored that they don't have the ability to do it, right?
It's still their job They have to try.
But let's be honest, they can't possibly do it.
Yeah, the Russia hoax.
Russia collusion hoax. So rather than fairness...
And by the way, I've often railed against the idea of fairness because fairness is just a subjective thing, right?
What you think is fair is not what I think is fair.
Fairness is not some law of physics where we can all just observe it and say, oh yeah, that's fair.
It's just an opinion.
So managing anything based on fairness is a bad idea because it's just opinions.
All right, so Lester Holt is right that it doesn't make sense to use fairness as your standard, but he's wrong to think that they can tell the difference between what's true and what isn't.
They don't have any ability to do that.
Indeed, I would say they might be among the worst, even worse than the public, maybe, at telling what's real and what's not.
And again, That's demonstrated by facts that anybody can check in the news.
It's all checkable.
They don't know the difference between hoaxes and reality.
They just don't. All right.
So let me tell you how I become president without trying.
Now, this would assume that I decided to run for president.
I'm going to tell you how I would do it and how I would win with 80% of the popular vote.
Are you ready? Number one.
I would run as a Democrat.
That's the first part.
Because if the Democrats...
Let's say I got nominated and actually was the nominee.
The Democrats, if you believe that they cheat in elections, they wouldn't cheat against me.
So I'd have that going for me.
I identify as black, so I've got that going for me.
And again, you still think that's a joke.
But it's not. It's not a joke at all.
And here's how I'd win.
I would make the following commitments.
I would be the first systems president.
Systems are better than goals.
Have I ever told you that before?
What's wrong with our government is that the systems are designed wrong.
So I would go in and redesign our key systems.
And here's some examples of how I would do it.
I would commit that I would never sign any bill.
I would veto every bill that had more than one topic on it.
If it's a single topic, I'll decide if I like it or not.
But if it's a bunch of things put together, I will reject it, and it doesn't matter what else.
I don't care what the things are.
I don't care how important they are.
You either have to send them to me as a single topic, And I don't even care if my own party sends it to me.
Let's say I'm a Democrat and the Democrats are the majority.
They send me something. Boom.
Veto. Pop. I don't care about the policy.
I care about the system.
As long as you have a system where you can't tell what's in the bill, you don't have a functional government.
That's what we have now. We have a dysfunctional government.
Go to...
So the biggest news...
In the country, I would argue, that has the most impact is Biden's $2.5 trillion infrastructure plan.
Go to the front page of Fox News and the front page of CNN and look for any link that's on the front page.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist in the world or that they haven't talked about it, but it's the biggest news in the world.
Look on their front page and see if there's anything that tells you the details in the bill.
It's not there. The two biggest news entities don't even have a link on the front page to something that says, what's in that bill?
$2.5 trillion.
Now, is that because the bill is good or the bill is bad?
No. No.
It's none of that. The system is broken.
The system doesn't even let you know what's in the bill.
Right? That's a broken system.
So I just wouldn't allow that to happen.
I'd just veto everything.
Now, they might override some vetoes.
They might override them if they had enough votes.
But I would certainly promise that to the public.
And then on top of that, I'd make the following promise.
Any bill that is over two pages long, I will veto.
That's it. If it's over two pages, I will veto it.
The third rule, and the reason is that anything over two pages is deliberately confusing.
If you can't put it on two pages, ideally one, you shouldn't have it.
If it can't fit on two pages, it shouldn't be a law.
Now, I would allow that other pages could be like exhibits or estimates or something like that.
But in terms of describing it, two pages.
How many pages is an omnibus bill?
500? Nobody could read it.
Thirdly, I would veto any bill with a misleading name.
So you know how the government likes to put a name on a bill that's the opposite of what the bill is?
Like if it's a bill to kill people, it will be the saving lives bill, you know, right?
So if the name on it, because the public kind of doesn't go much past the name, right?
They know what the name of the bill is.
That's how the infrastructure scam works.
So Biden calls it an infrastructure bill, and then they go to the public and say, what do you think about improving our infrastructure?
And the public says, infrastructure?
I like roads and bridges.
I'm all for it. But, of course, the name is intentionally misleading because it includes all kinds of things which you and I might not call infrastructure.
Could be good things.
Could be bad things.
But certainly you wouldn't call it infrastructure.
So those would be the three things I'd do.
And keep in mind that none of that is politics, right?
So nothing I've said so far has any political implication.
It has only a system implication.
The next thing I'd do It is trying to fix the other thing that's broken, which is the fake news.
And the way I do it, I've told you this before, is that for every national issue, I would do exactly what I'm doing right now.
I would take an iPad, I would sit it on the desk in the Oval Office, literally.
This is literal. I'd set it on the desk in the Oval Office, and I would invite in the two experts to argue, and maybe with some subsidiary helping experts, And I would make them debate with me, the pro and the con of whatever the decision is, in public, on livestream, while you watch.
And I would just fire it up for any meeting in the Oval Office that wasn't some secret military thing.
If it's a public policy discussion, and it's happening in the Oval Office, I'm just going to say, hey, you're going to be on camera, and I just turn on the iPad and say, let's talk.
Transparency. You would finally get transparency.
Because the news business can't be counted on to tell anybody The straight facts.
It's too opinion-y, right?
But if I were to make people argue in front of the country, and then I act as the, let's say, much like Trump on The Apprentice, where you're asking probing questions of both sides, you're not taking a side, you're challenging both sides.
And then, once I challenge them, I would look at the public opinion, And I would look at the opinions of people only who had watched the show, right?
So the first question would be, did you watch the entire livestream in which the topic was discussed, in which the president had the livestream on?
If yes, what is your opinion?
Leaving out all the people who decided to be uninformed or just weren't interested.
Because the only people I care about are the people who are heard both sides.
Do you care about an opinion or the opinion of someone who doesn't even know what the topic is?
Or somebody who heard one side or read a headline on CNN? That's all.
No, we don't even care about their opinions.
So I would only poll opinions of American citizens.
You've got to be a citizen. You don't have to be a voter.
Just a citizen. And did you watch it?
Which is sort of your proxy for being educated enough about the topic.
And then what's your opinion?
And then I would look at the public and I would say, all right, the public is informed.
It's really a judgment call.
It's about priorities.
It's not hard and fast, one is better than the other.
It's about judgment.
And the public has judged that by a majority they like this, I'll back the public.
Democrat or Republicans, doesn't matter.
I would ignore the party affiliation and say, all the people who got informed, if you got informed, I'll go with the majority.
Now, of course there has to be a safety valve, right?
One of the best parts about our government system, and this is the part you don't want to break, is that there will be times that the leader has to overrule the The masses.
Because the masses can be looking for blood.
The masses might vote to discriminate against the minority.
So you have to protect against, you know, the majority getting evil.
So I would do that, right?
If the situation just calls for, you know, an override of the public's opinion, I would do that, but I would make that really rare.
It would have to be a real obvious case.
So, with those changes and a few more, I would work from home.
I'd pick, let's say, an experienced senator or politician to do all the boring work back in Washington.
And I wouldn't even travel there except maybe just to live stream some meetings from the Oval Office.
But otherwise, I'd just work from home because you don't need much more than that.
All right, so Biden got four Pinocchios from the Washington Post, you know, or a Publication you would expect to be friendly to Biden, but even they gave him four Pinocchios for lying about some element to the Georgia voting law.
Basically, he's claiming that it shortens the hours you can vote, but it actually does the opposite.
So it's not even close to the truth.
It's literally the opposite of the truth.
They created an opportunity for the hours to be expanded, optionally, but they didn't do anything to reduce the hours.
And he's actually going in public and saying, The opposite.
The opposite. That they reduced hours.
Which would be a pretty big deal if it were true.
So Biden ran for office because Trump was a big liar.
That was his sales pitch.
Biden had two main sales pitches.
Three, I guess. You know, I suppose you could differ on that.
But one was he was going to fix the soul of the country as the fine people hoax informed him.
Now, of course, the first of his three reasons for running for office was that he believed the fine people hoax.
Okay, that's not good.
He literally became president...
One-third of his main reason was a hoax, and there's no question it was a hoax.
Two, he said that Trump was a big old liar.
Well, now we know for sure that Biden is a big old liar.
Now, I suppose you could say you could count out the number of lies, but that never makes sense, because usually they just repeat the same lies, right?
It's usually just the same ones they repeat, so it's not like they're coming up with new ones every day.
So I don't think you can make the claim that he came through with the honesty thing, or anything like it, really.
Would anybody say that Biden is telling the truth, yet routinely?
Doesn't look like it.
So the second leg of his reason for running is clearly debunked even here by the Washington Post.
Now, the third reason, and again, you could differ on what these reasons are, but to bring respect back to the United States.
Because his proposition was that other countries were just laughing at Trump.
They were just laughing at us.
We lost respect. But what do you think the other countries are saying about Biden?
Do you think the other countries are saying, well, America's back, because look at that vibrant leader they've got there.
Biden's got to control the stuff.
I don't think so.
So I think we could conclude, and I would say that I feel that this is just objectively true.
Is there any Democrat who would disagree with the following three statements?
Maybe, if they were uninformed.
But let's say an informed Democrat.
Somebody actually had the right information.
They would know about the fine people hoax.
They would certainly think he's not being respected overseas.
I mean, they see what we see, right?
He can barely walk upstairs.
And, of course, the lying is now confirmed.
So there's that.
All right, let's talk about this Matt Gaetz story that just gets weirder and weirder.
We are told to believe...
You know what?
This story...
There's so much bullshit in this story.
I don't even know where to start.
But... Apparently there's some indication that this Bob Levinson...
Who was maybe with the CIA who got captured by Iran so many years ago, and some say he's dead and some say he's alive, but for $25 million or something in that neighborhood, maybe he could be gotten out of Iran if he's alive, and that the only people who could do this were a couple of lawyers.
What? But if there's an American citizen who is associated with our intelligence agencies who is a captive in Iran, isn't that kind of a government job to get him back?
Why would some lawyer be trying to make this happen by getting money from Matt Gaetz's rich father to bribe somebody privately Without working through the government to get these people out.
Sounds sketchy to you?
How in the world am I supposed to believe that some lawyers in the United States can get this guy out, but our government can't?
Because our government has $25 million.
Here's what I think is happening.
Now, I don't know this for sure, but this is what I think is happening.
If you're going to play the odds, what would you think is happening?
Well, allow me to play the odds.
This has Nigerian prints written all over it.
Am I right? Am I right?
This just says Nigerian prints all over it.
I don't believe there's a guy, anybody, I don't believe anybody can get this guy out of Iran.
Secondly, I don't believe he's alive.
Sorry. I mean, I would love him to be alive, but I doubt it.
So it looks to me like what was going on is some kind of a financial scam.
Now, Matt Gaetz has characterized this as extortion.
I don't know the exact line where extortion is and where is somebody doing a financial scam, but I certainly wouldn't be giving $25 million or any millions of dollars to a lawyer in the United States who said he could get somebody out of Iran if our government couldn't.
You know what I mean?
So I think what's going on here is that It looks like something is a scam.
Now, I have no reason to believe that the lawyers are scamming, right?
So I don't have any reason to believe that any Americans are involved in any kind of a bad thing.
But whoever told them that they could get this guy out of Iran, I feel like that guy might be scamming us.
You know what I mean? Might be a little scamming going on there.
So I don't believe anything about this story.
I don't believe that Levinson is necessarily alive.
I don't believe anybody had any chance of getting him out.
And I think that probably profit was the motive at the bottom of all this.
And profit specifically for whoever it was who said he could get him out.
But we're going to find out a lot more about that, I guess.
So Biden just changed the rules to allow transgender in the military.
And that coincides with International Transgender Day of Visibility.
And you have to ask this question.
Is wokeness and killing compatible?
It feels like you have to do one or the other, right?
If the military is supposed to be a killing machine, I think you want it to err on the side of being a good killing machine, even if it's a little unfair to some groups in America.
I feel like that's kind of important.
But here's the real question.
Is there any reason to believe that transgender in the military would have any negative effect on killing potential?
Well, I don't have any information that would suggest that.
I've heard people say that there's a difference in readiness because of a higher propensity for medical treatments ongoing if you've transitioned.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but I would also think that would be highly individual, right?
For every person who might have ongoing medical stuff, well, you could, I would think, you could keep them out of the military just for medical reasons.
But there have to be plenty of transgenders who don't have any particular medical problems.
So, you know, I think this was always going to happen.
In other words, if you look at sort of the arc of history...
This was always going to happen.
I haven't heard that we are a less lethal killing force because gays are in the military.
Have you? Did anybody tell you our military is worse because gays are in the military?
I've seen no indication of that.
I don't expect you'll see any difference with transgenders as long as they still make a distinction between somebody who has some medical risk that you don't want in the military versus people who don't.
So I know that much of my audience disagrees with me on this issue, so we'll just let that disagreement hang.
All right. We seem to have these continuing situations of mind reading instead of a legal system.
Wouldn't you like your legal system to be based on what you did as opposed to what you thought?
You'd all agree with that, right?
That you shouldn't be prosecuted for thoughts, especially if they can't be demonstrated to be true.
So here are a couple of examples.
I'm looking at the George Floyd trial, and the potential charges are really hard for the regular person, non-lawyer to understand.
So let me do the best I can to run through what the charges are.
And see if we understand how they would fit, even if they make sense.
And by the way, I'm open to lots of fact checking on this.
I'm so far out of my realm of competence that it's irresponsible.
But I'll do it anyway, because I have no shame.
So there are three potential charges that Chavin could be convicted of in the George Floyd thing.
We've got second-degree manslaughter.
So apparently manslaughter, at least in Minnesota, manslaughter could have different degrees.
So what would second-degree manslaughter be?
And the other ones are second-degree murder and third-degree murder, which is a thing in Minnesota, but not necessarily a thing in other states.
So here's what second-degree manslaughter is.
And this is according to the Minnesota statutes.
This is specific to Minnesota.
When someone, quote, creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another, is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree.
So did Shaven do this?
Did he create an unreasonable risk and consciously take chances of causing death?
Now, consciously.
So the word consciously is right in the definition, meaning he had to know he was doing it.
Now, given that the hold he was using was in the police training book, I understand, would he have been expected to know that a standard police procedure would kill this guy?
That's a pretty hard case to make, isn't it?
Secondly, If you were trying to know the state of mind of the police officer, which is essential to this second-degree manslaughter, because you have to conclude that he's consciously taking these chances and he knows that he's taking these chances.
Now, how does that square with the fact he did it in front of an audience?
Do you believe that Shaven took a wild risk with his own life and his own career by doing something that if Floyd were to be killed or badly hurt, obviously this would be devastating for Officer Shaven.
So how could you say that a guy who is operating knowingly right in front of a crowd...
And it didn't happen that quickly, right?
I mean, events were kind of quick, but minutes and minutes passed.
So he was making a conscious decision that what he was doing, presumably, if you put me on the jury, I would assume this, that Shaven was doing what was good for Shaven.
Would you agree? Would you agree that everything we witnessed was Shaven doing something that was good for Shaven?
He was trying to protect himself from letting this guy get up and hurt anybody.
He was trying to do his job, which is good for Shaven.
He was trying to make sure that they got the arrest, which is good for Shaven.
At what point do you think Shaven said to himself, you know, I'll just be a little reckless right in front of all these witnesses, especially with cameras, and I don't think that'll be bad for me.
I don't think you can make the case that he believed he was hurting Floyd.
Because if he believed he was doing it, his own self-interest would have made him stop.
Because we don't see anything there that would suggest he was out of control.
Right? If she even wasn't Out of control.
He was, you know, making...
You know, it was a high-stress situation, but they're trained for that.
It wasn't so far out of his realm of training that we assume his mind stopped working.
So how would he...
In what world would Shaven think it would be a good idea for himself to put this guy in great danger?
It couldn't have been. There's no way Shaven could have imagined it would be good for Shaven.
To do something bad to this guy right in front of all these people.
No way he could have thought that.
So I don't think second-degree manslaughter fits because of the conscious part that he did in front of an audience.
How about second-degree murder?
It's a non-premeditated killing.
So everybody would agree he didn't premeditate it.
But it's resulting from an assault in which death of the victim was a distinct possibility.
Do you think that what Shaven was doing, he believed, created a distinct possibility of death?
Well, here's the problem.
It's police work.
Isn't a lot of your police work creating a distinct possibility of death?
It feels like half of police work is that, right?
Now, they're trying to avoid it, but police are...
Creating situations where there's a high possibility of death all the time, that feels like...
Oh, it's resulting from an assault.
Somebody is correcting me in the comments, correcting me correctly, that it should be resulting from an assault.
Was that an assault or was that an arrest?
I think if you said to the jury, hey, jury, was this an arrest or was it an assault?
The jury would just say, define assault for me.
Well, if it wasn't his intention to do anything but arrest him, again, don't you have to be a mind reader?
You would have to read Shaven's mind and think that he knew there was a distinct possibility and that he was assaulting him as opposed to arresting him.
What I saw was an arrest.
So I don't think this one even applies.
How about Minnesota third-degree murder?
So some states, or most actually, don't even have this category, but Minnesota does.
It was originally defined as depraved heart murder, and the definition of that would be without intent, so we agree, without intent, to affect the death of any person, the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others, And not caring about it.
So was Officer Shaven doing something that was eminently dangerous to Floyd, and he had no regard for his life?
Again, you would have to read his mind.
How do we know what Shaven was thinking?
Because at what part did we see on the video that he had no regard for human life?
Because I'll tell you what regard he did have.
His own life.
You would have to argue that Shaven didn't care about his own life.
Because what he was doing was putting his own life in a lot of danger.
Right? I mean, even if he gets acquitted and he goes into public, he's in a lot of danger.
Any police officer would have known that killing a guy right in front of a crowd is going to be really bad for the police officer.
So again, what is obvious about the situation is that the police officer couldn't possibly have known that things would have gone this way.
Because if he knew it, or suspected it, or worried about it, he would have acted differently.
Right? He wouldn't have acted that way to put himself in that much danger.
Nobody does that.
I mean, just that defense alone should get him off.
That nobody would put themselves in that kind of danger.
Because when the crowd is watching, Chavin's life and Floyd's life became connected.
There was no situation where one could die and the other one would have a good day.
It couldn't happen. There's no way.
I mean, even if there were no legal problems, even if there were no legal problems, would you want to be the police officer who killed a guy accidentally?
No way. So I would say just on common sense alone, none of these apply.
And the reason is, Shaven was in his right mind, as far as we can tell.
Nothing showed he was crazy.
And he had an audience.
As soon as you add the audience, you have to assume he didn't know what was going on.
He didn't know it was that dangerous.
All right. According to Rasmussen, 44% of likely U.S. voters say requiring proof of COVID vaccination is a good idea.
And 41% say it's a bad idea.
So how do you think this breaks out in terms of people?
Well, I've been saying for a long time that black Americans are natural Republicans, but they just haven't realized it.
Because here's another case, and I think there are a lot of these cases, in which the Republican opinion and the black majority opinion are kind of similar.
Which is a distrust of government and a distrust of authority.
If you think about it, what is the major theme of black...
I don't want to say complaints, because when you say complaints, it makes it sound like maybe they're not valid.
Let's say, what would be a better word?
Black criticisms of the system.
I would say black criticisms of our system are entirely valid because they say we don't trust police, part of the system.
We don't trust anything.
That the system is so racist that the whole thing is untrustworthy.
What is the dominant feeling of Republicans?
Don't give the government any more money.
Don't let the government do any more plans.
Don't let the government have any more power.
So if you think about it, the Republican distrust of the government and black Americans' distrust of the government are weirdly similar.
And you can see in a topic like this, where vaccines are not traditionally a political thing, and when people just get to decide...
Without really thinking it's a left or right thing.
It's just, do I want a vaccination or not?
Do I want a passport or not?
You end up with Black America and Republican America largely similar.
Largely similar. And I don't think that's unusual.
And I think that those two opinions are so close to being the same opinion You can't give the government too much power.
The people need to be free.
There's probably some common ground there.
It's not exactly common, but it's closer than you think.
All right, so CNN is priming the public to riot.
They've got an article on there, an opinion piece by somebody named Peniel Joseph.
It's an interesting name.
I think the first name is Peniel.
P-E-N-I-E-L. I like people with interesting names.
Peniel. I'm sure he was teased in high school.
If your name has most of the letters of penis in it, you're going to get teased.
So I feel sorry for him.
But here's what he wrote, among other things, on CNN. Now, ask yourself...
If this opinion piece is designed to create a riot, because it looks like it.
I mean, I don't think that necessarily he was thinking that, but when CNN decided to run it, was CNN thinking to themselves, well, this is just a harmless opinion?
Or did CNN say, this will get us the riots we need.
This will get us that riot.
Here's what he said, and you decide if CNN thought this was just an opinion, Or perfectly what they needed to spark a riot.
So Peniel says, collectively the harrowing accounts of witnesses and bystanders who watched Floyd die offer tragically compelling evidence of state-sanctioned violence against black bodies.
What happened to him resembled a public execution, one that echoes for many the anti-black lynchings that mark the Jim Crow era.
Now, does that opinion sound like just an opinion?
That doesn't sound like just an opinion.
This sounds like somebody who's trying to start a riot.
A race war. Now, I'm not going to say that's what they're thinking, but I'm going to say it reads like it, which is different than knowing what somebody's thinking, right?
It reads exactly like somebody's trying to start a riot.
Why would you do that?
Why wouldn't you, instead, if you wanted to prevent a riot, remind people that the legal system is very important And that if the legal system shows that Shaven is not guilty of, let's say, these three murder-related things, that we should accept it, because the system is doing what the system does.
They could do that.
That would be an opinion, too.
Where's the opinion on CNN that says, you know, you should get ready for the fact that Shaven might not be found guilty, and there might be a good reason he's not found guilty?
There might be. They don't even have to say there will be.
They just say, you should be ready.
Just be prepared that he's not actually guilty.
Not that he would get off, but that he's not actually guilty.
Just be prepared.
That's a possibility.
Where's that? Well, you're not going to see that on CNN, will you?
And I don't even think you'll see that on Fox News, because Fox News, too, would benefit by a riot.
Now again, I don't believe there's any person who's sitting there saying, I want to riot.
That'll be good for profitability.
All I'm saying is that when money's involved, people act in a way, coincidentally, my opinion happens to align for completely moral and ethical reasons.
Just doing my job.
Yes, by coincidence, that would really help me.
I suppose I would get richer.
If I work for the news business, then there's a riot, but that's not why I'm making the decisions.
And in their mind, they're not even lying to themselves.
They believe that they're not being influenced.
But of course they are.
We're humans. Humans are not free of the impact of Gigantic financial incentive.
We're the opposite of whatever that is.
All right. So, I hope enough of you...
Oh, we've got...
Really?
4,100 people are watching this?
Holy cow. So I guess the Periscopers, you must have come over.
It looks like almost everybody from Periscope.
I don't think we could get to that number unless almost everybody came over.
Larry, what did you say?
Yes, Larry, we will be safe in Pleasanton.
That's true. Alright, so that's all for today.
And I'll let you know if I open up any more platforms.
But for now, let us enjoy our April 1st and see if we can get back to normal as soon as possible.