Episode 1350 Scott Adams: Chauvin Persuasion, Social Media Tightens its Grip and More
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Content:
Jacob Frey on Chauvin actions
Final opinion: George Floyd, Derek Chauvin
Emotional jury manipulation
Does China control our social media and news?
James Charles YouTube demonetization
Steve Cortes narrative violation
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It's called the simultaneous sip, but it's going to happen right now.
Get ready, get ready, get ready, go.
Savor it. Savor it.
Okay. Well, the most important news of the day, and I don't say this lightly, if you haven't heard this news report, let me be the first one to tell you.
There's a new documentary that investigates whether Bigfoot murdered some Northern California pot farmers.
No, I'm not making that up.
There's an actual documentary looking into whether Bigfoot murdered some Northern California pot farmers.
And the investigative journalist heard a story that still haunts him about a savage Bigfoot attack.
So that seems credible enough.
It's in the news. In related news, CNN will host a special of its own to determine if racism is the cause of Bigfoot's attack.
No, that's not true.
No, just the CNN part's not true.
The other part's true.
There's a documentary about Bigfoot killing people in my state.
I don't know how far away this happened, but I am in the same state as a murderous Bigfoot, and if you think I'm happy about that, one more thing to worry about?
I wake up this morning and I'm like, oh, what do I have to worry about?
Let's see. There's climate change, and there could be some riots.
What? Murderous Bigfoot?
Somewhere on the loose in my state?
And how many of them are there?
And did the Bigfoot have any accomplices?
These are the things we need to know on 420.
All right. In other news, Ron DeSantis just became president in 2024.
You need some details on that?
Yeah, Ron DeSantis just became president in 2024.
He's not, you know, we're not there yet.
But he did something this week that if this doesn't guarantee it, just guarantee he'll be president.
Let me tell you what it is, and in the comments I want to see if you get it.
It's not a headline, but it will be.
It will be a headline.
It goes like this.
This is actually so clever that it's funny.
You ever see somebody just does something that's so smart that it actually just makes you laugh because you didn't think of it?
Here you go. So there's a new law, I guess he just signed it, in Florida, DeSantis Estate, and it grants civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking a road.
You see it? It's over.
It's frickin' over.
Talk about picking up free money.
Are you not laughing?
Seriously. How many of you are laughing out loud?
Because why did he think of this?
Nobody else thought of this?
Oh, somebody says a few states have that now.
But even so, the fact that he would make this change, or at least sign it, who knows who was behind it, but he signs this thing just at the perfect time.
I can't think of anything that would be more on point than this.
I tell you, he just won the presidency.
It's over now.
Let's see. Meanwhile, Minneapolis...
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, or Frey, I don't know.
He said this in public.
Compare these to political actions.
All right, the Ron DeSantis one, one of the smartest things you'll ever see politically.
Now, here's the dumbest thing you'll ever see from Mayor Jacob Frey.
He said yesterday, in public, he said this.
That's the funny part is that he said it in public.
Regardless of the decision made by the jury, regardless of the decision made by the jury, there is one true reality, which is that George Floyd was killed at the hands of police.
That's like the dumbest thing a politician ever said in public.
Now, I happen to think he's right.
Right? So from a purely factual standpoint, I think he's probably right.
I think it would be fair to say that he died at the hands of police, which is not funny.
Just the way this idiot is treating it is funny.
So let me give you my final opinion on Chauvin and George Floyd.
Now, of course, we've all had preliminary opinions, which maybe in some cases we've revised as the trial goes on.
Just the way things should work, right?
The trial should change your mind or solidify your opinion.
That's why we have them. And I would say that my opinion has drifted from the beginning.
So here's my final opinion, having seen, I think, enough of...
I haven't watched every minute, but I feel like I saw enough of the defense and the prosecution.
My final opinion is this.
Chauvin's actions probably...
We're a deciding factor in Floyd's death.
Probably. In other words, in my opinion, probably Chauvin's actions killed Floyd.
Now, I think that there's a good likelihood that there are other factors which would add to the reasonable doubt question.
But on the question of what's most likely, Most likely what he did had some effect, probably an important effect, on the end of Floyd's life.
Did he know it?
Well, that's a separate question.
We'll talk about that in a minute, whether he knew it.
But certainly the thing he did, in my opinion, and again, we have to have only an opinion here, because we're not doctors, and there's some difference of expert opinion, right?
But in my opinion, it's more likely that Chauvin did end the guy's life.
I won't say the guy because we'll treat him with more respect.
Let's say George Floyd's life was ended.
Probably had something to do with Chauvin.
However, do you go to jail because you probably were part of it?
Well, that's where it gets a little tricky.
So I do agree that Jacob Freyer Fry, the mayor, is probably right that it was homicide.
I think that part is sort of tactically true.
But to say that out loud when things are so sensitive is just dumb.
This is just dumb politics.
Alright. We're going to talk more about the trial.
Have you noticed that the trolls are out?
Sometime this week, and yesterday I noticed it when I was talking with Ari Cohn, A bunch of somewhat obvious trolls, the ones who have zero followers and they don't have a profile picture and they just signed up, that sort of thing.
So a bunch of trolls that I'd not seen for quite a while in the political process.
They'd gone quiet for a while.
But they came out recently.
And I just got hammered on some tweets about the Chauvin-Floyd case.
And it looks like most of them are paid trolls.
Who's paying them? Who are paying all the trolls who are talking about my comments about the case and saying that no matter what I say about it, that therefore it's proof I'm a racist?
What kind of troll would do that, and who would pay them?
Would they be independently operated?
It could be. Could they be democratic operatives?
Maybe. Could be.
I mean, that would be consistent with what we've seen.
And we have a history of that, Democrats hiring trolls.
We know that's a thing. That's a genuine, confirmed, no doubt about it thing.
Democrats have hired trolls for social media purposes.
But is this what's happening?
Here's another hypothesis.
And it's just a hypothesis.
China already controls our media, both news and social media, via artificial intelligence.
So this is the hypothesis.
Now, how could you prove it?
Well, I don't know of a way directly.
So, you know, short of some kind of cyber magic where we can actually determine what's happening.
I don't know if that's going to happen.
But here's what to watch for.
How often will our news media and social media create a narrative which is exactly what China would want us to create?
If it happens over and over again that our narrative corresponds exactly to what China wants it to be, at some point you have to ask yourself if that's a coincidence.
Now let's take the Floyd trial.
We'll take this as one data point, which does not prove the hypothesis, right?
So understand that anecdotal stuff, any one situation, doesn't prove anything.
But it's what to watch for, right?
To see if this was repeated enough where the pattern becomes, you know, hard to ignore.
So what would China's, if you can imagine, what would be their best interpretation or narrative that they would want The United States to adopt as its main one.
Well, they definitely would not want us to say that fentanyl was a big cause.
Do we all agree? China is intentionally sending fentanyl in large amounts to the United States to kill our citizens.
We know this to be true.
This is not in any kind of doubt.
Do they want us to get really, really mad and understand this is what's happening, China sending fentanyl and killing tens of thousands of people a year?
Do they want us to think that and really focus on that?
No. What would China like us to focus on instead of focusing on China sending us fentanyl?
Racism. The number one thing, and there's no doubt about this, right, the number one thing China wants is It's for the United States to think racism is the dominant theme in America, and that's what we should be focusing on, because it'll tear us apart.
And it also makes it easier for them to put Uyghurs in prison camps, right?
If you're China, you want the United States to have a whole bunch of racism problems so that they can do anything they want with their Uyghurs and say, look, hey, you know, you can't talk.
We're not going to even address what you're talking about, but you can't say anything.
Right? So when you see that the official narrative of both the news and social media, at least the left-leaning portions, are solidly, solidly identical to what the Chinese narrative would be for us if they wanted to give us a narrative, it's exactly what's happening.
Is it the reason it's happening?
What do you think? Do you think that China already has the ability...
To do what I just described.
Use AI. Maybe TikTok, social media, trolls, etc.
Maybe direct payments to some people.
Maybe some people are just agents working for our media.
Do they have the power to create this narrative, and did they do it?
Are we watching it happen right now?
There's no way to know, is there?
But if I had to bet...
Without knowing, but somebody said, you know, gun dead, you just gotta bet.
I would bet probably.
I would bet probably what we're seeing is Chinese, China the country, not the people.
Every once in a while I like to stop and pause.
Chinese people I love.
Like, I love Chinese people.
Americans in China, wherever they are.
But the Chinese government...
We've got a problem with. So just to be clear that we're always talking about the government when we talk about China in a negative light.
And you can see that I riled up the obvious trolls today.
So look at my Twitter feed and look at the troll activity and ask yourself if those trolls look to be speaking proper English.
So the first question he asks is, is the way they phrase things Does that look like it came from an American?
Now you have to be careful, because there are lots of Americans who don't have English as a primary first language.
But just ask yourself.
It's just part of the fact pattern.
All right. Here's a little rule I would like to put out there, just to play with it.
Whoever tries to control the narrative wins if nobody else is trying.
In a situation where there's only one entity that even cares how the narrative goes, that they always win.
Let's say they're a superpower or they have some power.
Anybody powerful who cares enough can change the narrative so long as there's nobody else trying to change it in a different way.
In the Floyd case, It feels to me that if there were some entity that wanted to control this narrative, that there's not really some kind of organized pushback.
It's just a bunch of us trying to figure out what's going on.
Really. I mean, I feel as if, even though we politicize everything in this country, I feel like at the bottom of it all, the real most important thing that Americans are feeling is they want the court to be right.
There's probably nothing we want more than for the decision to be right, whatever that is.
And I feel as if China might have a different opinion of what they want to happen.
So they might have the only narrative preference that is strong enough and they have the power to make it happen.
That there's no counter-narrative that anybody's doing in any organized, big, hire trolls, use AI kind of way, right?
I think they're just fighting alone.
If it were something that had more to do with, let's say, national integrity or defense, I would suspect that we have spooks who could push back on the narrative, right?
And then maybe there's something like an even tension there.
All right, let's talk about the Chauvin trial.
We now have both the defense and the prosecution have done their final arguments.
And I told you where I come out on this is that I think Chauvin is guilty.
Well, guilty, let's say, not in a legal sense.
But I do believe that he is likely a cause, at least a major cause, of Floyd's death.
The question of whether there are other factors, whether he knew about it, Those all go to his defense or guilt.
But in my opinion, he did something.
Now, I heard from Robert Barnes yesterday.
I was watching Frey and Barnes on their podcast.
Which is tremendous, by the way.
It's the best...
I hate to say it because I do a live stream too.
But if you're not watching Frey and Barnes, F-R-E-Y, and Barnes talk about this case, you're really missing the best analysis of it.
And I've seen some different analyses.
They do the best job, I'd say.
And here's where I come in on all this.
My verdict is that I don't believe Chauvin was completely aware that what he was doing was dangerous.
Now, does it matter?
I'm sorry, I spelled it.
I confused the mayor with Frey and Barnes.
F-R-E-I. So the correct spelling is Viva, V-I-V-A, F-R-E-I, and I apologize for getting that wrong, because I just did the story about the guy with the other spelling.
All right, so the...
Here's my take.
I don't think Chauvin was aware that he was doing it, and the reason is that he did it right in front of everybody in slow motion.
It was compatible enough with common police procedure...
The other police officers didn't seem to be alarmed or look to stop him.
There was some distraction from the crowd, so it's not clear that Chauvin was either smart enough or aware enough to do CPR when it was called for.
So my verdict, if it were me, is that reasonable doubt has been clearly established.
At the same time, I think he's probably a big part of what killed Floyd and probably didn't do what he should have done.
Can we allow that?
Can anybody have a...
Is it possible to have a reasoned opinion that the guy is sort of guilty of something at the same time that reasonable doubt might allow him to go free?
Can both be true? I think they can, right?
So let's talk about where this is likely to go.
Now keep in mind that I don't have a legal background, so anything I say on this, you know, grain of salt, and maybe we can see how dumb I am at the end.
So we'll see how it actually turns out, and then you'll have a better idea how dumb I am about legal stuff.
But my take is this.
I believe that the jury has now heard three separate jury instructions.
I don't think you'll hear this analysis anywhere else.
But this is my take.
The jury has heard three different...
Jury instructions.
And the jury instructions are everything in this case.
It's everything. For example, if the jury was instructed that it doesn't matter what Chauvin was thinking, it didn't matter if he knew it was dangerous or not, well, that gives you one outcome.
If the jury thinks it does matter, What Chauvin was thinking and that he didn't know he was doing anything wrong, well, you might get a different outcome, right?
Now, my examples might not be perfect, but these are the things which are known.
We know that the defense was accused of misstating what the jury instructions were.
So that's two versions.
One is what the judge gave, the actual jury instructions.
One is what the defense claimed they were, which was, you know, debunked.
And then there was what the prosecution claimed it was, which I believe also was misinterpreted.
Now, the judge went to solve that by agreeing that he would re-read the instructions and make sure the jury knew that the lawyers could not introduce new evidence, etc., and that they had to listen to the real instructions and From the judge, and they should ignore anything that a lawyer says about the instructions.
I think I got that right, roughly.
What do you do if you're the jury?
Keep in mind that now they've heard three sets of jury instructions, and the jury instructions will completely determine how they vote, to the extent that they even follow the instructions.
All right, so now you've got three sets of instructions.
And you've got 12 jurors who are normal Americans.
Give me 12 normal Americans.
Give them three different sets of instructions.
What's happening during deliberations?
Right? Have you ever worked at any big company or been in a business meeting with 12 ordinary people who have three completely different sets of really pretty confusing instructions and It's a complicated frickin' thing.
Whatever is happening in that jury room has nothing to do with the data, has nothing to do with reason, has nothing to do with justice.
Right? It's just a bunch of people who could not possibly be asked to make good decisions under these circumstances.
And somebody's life, actually lots of lives, if you think of the outcome, there are lots of lives on the line.
And they don't have a chance.
The jurors just don't have a chance.
It's way too complicated.
And three sets of instructions.
There's no way they can unwind that stuff and come to some smart conclusion.
If you replace the entire trial with the best lawyer in the world, whoever it is, let's put in Ellen Dershowitz just for our example, And just say, all right, we won't even have a jury.
We'll just have Alan Dershowitz decide.
Because at least he knows the law.
He can sort out the complications.
And you know he can at least handle the argument.
I don't even think he can handle this.
I think even somebody as qualified as the best lawyer in the world would say, you know, it's kind of a gray area.
I've got to admit. Now, all of that suggests that the result should be That the burden of proof to a reasonable doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt, has not been met.
In my opinion, that standard is not even close.
My subjective opinion, not being a lawyer and not being on the jury so I didn't get to see everything they saw.
So from a different perspective, bias though it may be, I'm imagining I have the same kinds of biases as everybody else, but to my mind, Reasonable doubt is easily met.
But again, I'm not qualified nor informed.
It's just my opinion.
At the same time, I think probably Chauvin is guilty of doing the final acts that killed Mr.
Floyd. The prosecution started with an emotional appeal in which he talked about the humanity of Mr.
Floyd. Mr.
Floyd and how he loved his mother, etc., and he was popular within his family.
How much of that has anything to do with the case?
How much of the emotional appeal has anything to do with the facts of the case?
None of it, right? So when you watch the prosecution play obviously to emotion and not even really talk about the facts of the case for a big portion of the closing, how do you feel about that?
Because I would like to know that the system didn't allow that.
I would prefer a system in which the judge said, everybody understands that human beings shouldn't be killed.
You don't need to make us feel worse about it.
Just deal with the facts.
Did it happen?
Is there guilt under the law?
How is it even legal?
This is a real question.
How is it even legal...
To spend a bunch of time making people just feel especially bad when you know the point of that is to overcome their understanding and their dealing with the facts.
How is that even legal?
Seriously. Now, I get that you need to do a little bit of it.
You do need to establish that we should care about everybody, right?
He's not a criminal that you just say, well, we don't care if he's guilty or not.
Wouldn't matter. He must be a bad person.
So you don't want that.
But it's one thing to establish that your person is a real person, you know, worthy of all the protections of the Constitution.
And it's another thing to just use gross emotional blackmail, basically, or manipulation on the jury while we're all watching.
So if you're going to say to me, what does a travesty of justice look like?
It looks like any of the lawyers trying to convince a jury to use their emotions over the facts.
And we saw that right in front of us.
We watched that happen.
How is that cool?
I'm sure it's legal, but it's not cool.
And I've got to tell you, if I were in the jury and I had to sit through one more minute of George Floyd was an awesome guy, which I believe is actually true, You know, this sounds like he was pretty awesome.
He had some drug problems, and people have drug problems.
And, you know, if he did other crimes, those are other crimes.
So I don't even know why that's legal.
All right. The other thing is the jury, of course, will be influenced by Maxine Waters claiming that there should be more confrontational stuff.
Which even the judge pointed out is probably grounds for dismissal.
Or what do you call it? Grounds for appeal.
So here we have a situation where...
This is how ridiculous this is.
Chauvin apparently is probably going to go to jail for a different crime.
Did you know that? I heard this on Frey and Barnes too.
That apparently Chauvin has a whole separate legal problem with allegedly not paying his taxes for years.
So he's going to go to jail for 10 years or something anyway?
Beyond that, we have an emotional case, not a factual case.
We have three different sets of jury instructions.
We have 12 people who couldn't possibly, at least collectively, all of them, couldn't possibly understand the complexity of even what the charges mean or how to sort them out.
There's no such thing as 12 people who can do that.
It isn't even a thing.
Let's see what else is wrong with this.
Yeah, I guess that's the main thing.
All right, and we know that it'll be overturned on appeal, or at least the appeal would be pretty solid.
So you've got jurors who are worried about their own life if they're smart.
You know, somebody said on social media, well, they were instructed not to watch the news so that they don't really know that they're in danger.
They know they're in danger.
Come on. Of course they know.
They knew before they got on the jury.
Everybody knew that if you were on this jury, there was a little bit of extra danger.
So here are the charges.
Now that you've heard the whole case, let me describe what the charges mean and see if these apply.
There's second-degree unintentional murder.
So that would allege that Chauvin caused Floyd's death without intent.
So, no intention is required.
While committing or attempting to commit felony third-degree assault, meaning that the third-degree assault was intentional infliction of substantial bodily harm.
So, was Chauvin intentionally inflicting substantially bodily harm in a way that a reasonable person could have known death was a possibility?
And I would say, no.
Because he was doing something that has worked lots of times without killing anybody and is actually part of police procedure described as the least dangerous thing you can do under some circumstances.
So I'd say, at least in terms of reasonable doubt, there's so much of it here that I don't think a reasonable jury, if they were basing it on the facts, second degree unintentional murder, I don't see any chance.
Now, there is a chance in the political sense he'll be guilty of that, but not on a factual basis.
I don't think it's even close.
Then there's the third-degree murder charge that says that the death was caused by Chauvin perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind without regard to human life.
So an example of that, I understand, would be shooting into a crowd.
You weren't trying to kill some specific person, but you were certainly not caring if anybody died and your actions caused it.
Is that what happened?
Do you think that Chauvin was perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others?
Now this is where it gets complicated.
He was doing something that only was a danger to the person he was dealing with, And he had a specific reason to do it, which could be a good reason or a bad reason, but he had a specific reason that was within the realm of police work.
So I don't see how this could possibly apply, but I guess you'd have to really be a lawyer to know.
But how is the jury going to even deal with this question?
Like, I read this question and I don't even know how to deal with it.
Do you think the jury does?
All to all people? They're all more capable than I am at dealing with the complexity of this question.
What exactly are they determining?
Are they determining Chauvin's guilt, or is the jury trying to figure out if their own reading comprehension sucks?
Because that's really what will determine whether he goes to jail, whether the jury has good reading comprehension.
There's your system for you.
All right. Then how about second-degree manslaughter?
Now here we get into something that at least has a chance of being factually proven.
And that charge alleges that Chauvin causes Floyd's death by, quote, culpable negligence, whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm.
So do you think that what Chauvin was doing was consciously...
Because here's the mind-reading part.
You have to know that Chauvin was consciously doing something that was obviously dangerous.
But again, it was police procedure.
It was considered the least harmful way to do this situation.
Floyd was kicking.
There's reasonable doubt all over this thing, because in order to say he's guilty of this, you have to know his state of mind.
He didn't even testify.
How in the world are you going to read Chauvin's mind to come up with he consciously knew he was doing this, when he did it in slow motion in front of witnesses with cameras?
There's so much reasonable doubt here.
This would be the easiest...
If it were not political, it would be the easiest case in the world to win.
But because it's political, who knows?
All right. Now, I heard some people say to me that their interpretation of the jury instructions Or that Chauvin's state of mind, and I think the prosecution said this too, that what Chauvin was thinking or intending doesn't matter.
It's just what he did.
But do you think the jury will ignore, will take the prosecution's interpretation, and just ignore what Chauvin was thinking?
Would you do that? Would you ignore that Chauvin might not have known he was doing anything that could have been dangerous?
How do you ignore that?
Because even if it's technically illegal and you should go to jail for your actions, would you on a jury actually put somebody in jail if you knew they didn't even know they were doing it?
Really? Because I'm not sure I would.
Even if I understood the law had nothing to do with intention, I would still include it in my decision because I'm a human being and it does matter.
I don't care that it doesn't matter under the law.
I'm a human. I'm a juror.
See, one of the things that many of you don't understand is that the law is very specific about what the jury is supposed to do.
But once it's your responsibility as a human being and an American, And you've been put on a jury, what is your responsibility?
Is your responsibility to protect the law?
No, it's not.
Your responsibility is to be responsible.
That's it. Your responsibility is to do the right thing.
As you would want it done to you, you know, or as you would like the system to be.
So if you think the law is not an appropriate law, Maybe the law does say it doesn't matter if you knew you were doing it or not.
You're still going to put that in there.
I would. I wouldn't even consider following the law if I considered the law unjust.
Would you? And why?
Why would you do that? So I certainly would ignore any instructions that said that I couldn't consider my own feelings about whether the law should even be a law.
Speaking of that, well, let me tell you what I would do if I were in the jury.
And I got a lot of pushback from trolls, maybe Chinese trolls, on social media.
Here's what I'd do. On the first day of deliberations, I'd say, mind reading isn't a thing.
And if you don't know what he was thinking, we're done here.
That's it. That would be my entire deliberation.
And no matter what they said, you know, what arguments or what topics, when they got to me, I'd say, well, you know, mind reading, still not real.
It's still only imaginary.
And while we can be right quite often about people's intentions, we're not often right enough that I'm going to send somebody to jail because you think you could do it this time.
Mind reading? Not real.
And then when somebody says, but we're supposed to ignore what he was thinking, I would say, sure, you can do that.
I'm done. Unless you can convince me that mind-reading is real, there's nothing to talk about.
I'm just done. But I would also vote guilty on all counts to protect my family, but I would tell the public I did that.
So after the trial, I would go to the public and say, I didn't really consider any of the evidence in this case.
I just voted guilty to protect my family.
Now, what happened to me when I said that on Twitter?
Coward, people said.
Coward! See, it's happening in the comments here.
Nice, a moral coward.
Would you do it for money?
That's not the topic.
So who else thinks that that would be cowardly?
Let me... Let me break this down for you.
If you would put the outcome of this trial over your family, I applaud your braveness.
Your bravery is impressive.
You would actually kill your own family to protect a system which is not doing anything useful whatsoever.
And you would be very, very brave for that.
So congratulations for all of you I applaud you.
You're a better person than me.
Those of you who would kill your own families to support a verdict which has no bearing on anything and will just be political, congratulations.
You're very brave and I wish I could be more like you.
Now what I would do, as opposed to that impressive bravery which all of you seem to have, killing your families to gain nothing, nothing at all, But you did kill your family.
Maybe. So very brave of you.
Here's how I would have played it.
I would have broken the entire system.
In other words, the moment I went to the press and said I didn't use the facts to vote because I was afraid for my family, the appeal wins, right?
That's the end of the system.
So I would break the entire system because it's all bad.
It's based on emotions and politics.
It's not based on the facts.
If you want to protect the system, you have to break it.
The only way to protect our system, in this case, is to just break it.
Now, I do think that if they tried him again, if they could find some circumstance to get the emotion out of it, and he's guilty, that's fine.
I mean, I'm not defending Chauvin.
He looks like a bad dude to me.
I don't feel any love for him.
And for those of you who think, hey, Scott, you must be defending Chauvin because he's white, you don't know white people very well.
White people don't defend guilty white people.
It's sort of a strategic superpower.
Take two cultures and you don't know anything else about them, except one of them punishes their guilty people and rewards the people who are not guilty, And the other one doesn't do that.
Who comes out ahead in the long run?
Well, I think popularizing your criminals, that's probably a bad strategy for the long run.
All right, speaking of injustice, there's a YouTube star named James Charles.
Do you all know him? So James Charles is a young man who does makeup videos.
So he does, I guess, what would be the most non-offensive 2021 way to say this?
I don't know what his sexual orientation is.
It's at least...
Bisexual, but I don't want to characterize him.
So it's at least bisexual.
That's all I know. Or gay, or he doesn't...
non-binary. Who knows what it is.
But that's not important.
What's important is he does makeup videos in which he has over 25 million subscribers.
He's enormous.
If you've ever watched his show, he's really good.
I've watched his content a number of times.
Christina is a fan.
And apparently he's really good with makeup.
So, you know, he's just sort of quite gifted in makeup and explaining it.
So in terms of talent, he's very talented.
And in my view, he's earned everything he got.
He's just really good at it.
But here is what he is accused of and apparently has admitted...
In part, that he did some sexy texting with some people.
He says, claimed they were 18, but now we know they might have been 16.
Now, he admits doing it, and admits it was a mistake, but he also says that he asked them and they said they were 18, or he assumed they were 18.
Now, keep in mind he's a young man, so he's not like, you know, some old creeper.
So, had they been 18...
They would have been, you know, not too grossly in of the range of, you know, people get together.
Not like my situation, which has you all upset.
So here, now here's the kicker.
YouTube demonetized them.
All right? Now keep in mind, the facts that we all understand, and I don't know that there's much difference in how we interpret the facts, Is that he admits what happened.
He says he was not aware any crime was being committed because he wasn't aware of their age, right?
And how old is he?
Somebody says he's 21.
Can somebody confirm that?
Because it does matter.
If he's close to 18, that matters, right?
So he's admitted it, and he said he wouldn't have done it if he had been aware that they were the age they were.
Now he got demonetized.
Do you know how much money is involved if you have 25 million subscribers?
We're talking about millions, tens of millions of dollars that YouTube took from him based on a crime he has not been committed for.
So he's not been convicted of any crime.
Not only has he not been convicted of a crime, but his telling of it is at least as plausible as the alternative telling.
It's not like he has an implausible story, right?
It's not implausible.
It's actually quite plausible.
Do you believe that had he known there were 16, he would have left permanent records on text Or messaging that could be discovered later.
Obviously, he could be blackmailed by anybody that he had said this to.
So I'm seeing people saying that he's 21, almost 22.
All right, that matters. So here's my problem.
Again, I don't want to be the guy who is, who, you know, I know the trolls will come and say, Scott, you're, you're defending people trying to do things with underage kids.
No, I'm not doing that.
I'm just saying if somebody doesn't know they're committing a crime, very much like the Chauvin case, right?
If they don't know, how can YouTube demonetize this guy?
So, apparently this is YouTube's response.
And if this is not chilling, I don't know what is.
So, this is a quote from YouTube.
If we see that a creator's on and or off platform behavior, so things they did not on So in other words,
YouTube can demonetize you if there's something you did in your private life that you have not been convicted for, not been convicted for, innocent until proven guilty, but YouTube doesn't like it because they're going to say it harms them, they can kick you off.
How many of us are vulnerable to that?
Well, I am. So apparently this rule gives YouTube all they need to kick me off right now for things I've done outside of YouTube.
So in other words, if you look at my Twitter feed, you can see that countless people are accusing me of being a racist because I think probable cause should be important in a legal trial.
Of course I would have the same opinion if the races were reversed in the case.
Of course I would. Because reasonable doubt is more important than all of that stuff, right?
But YouTube can now quite reasonably look at my Twitter feed and say, Hundreds of people are accusing you of a horrible thing, being a racist.
We don't want any of that.
So even though you've never done anything on our platform, which would cause us a problem, we have a rule which would allow us to kick you off based on you not being quite the kind of person that we think is good and we think you might be dangerous to people on our platform.
Just think about the power that that has.
They have the power to control your economic life and also the power to take it away based on them not liking what you did outside of your dealings with them that were not even illegal or had not been convicted for.
That's pretty bad.
There's some CNN propaganda happening right now In which they're writing a story about two friends.
I think it was a white woman and a young black guy.
And they were talking about how they were treated differently by cops at a traffic stop.
Now, when you hear that story, you say to yourself, well, I know where this is going to go.
The police will treat the young black man very roughly...
They'll treat the white person, in this case a woman, I think, they'll treat her less likely, and now we'd see another evidence that the police are brutal against black people, which is exactly what you want to see when the Floyd verdict is coming, right? So if this looks like they're throwing matches into gasoline, they are.
But then you listen to the actual story, and it turns out that the police...
Handcuffed and briefly detained the young black man they found because there was a warrant out by somebody with his exact name, and I think it was an unusual name.
You can tell from the recording that the police realized they had the wrong guy, and then later they found out that somebody else had used this fellow's name When stopped and didn't have ID, I guess.
So there was somebody unrelated to this story, some other person at a different time, who had used this perp's, not perp's, I'm sorry, he was an innocent guy.
This perp had used the innocent guy's name, and so when the innocent guy was stopped by the police for whatever normal thing, they briefly detained him, determined fairly quickly that he was the wrong guy, probably just from photos, I assume, And then released him with something that sounded sort of like an apology.
Now, is this a case of the police treating this guy poorly?
I don't think so.
Don't you imagine that if the white person had had an unusual name and an arrest warrant under that name, they would have at least Held the other person until they found out if they had the right person and then released them when they found out they didn't.
How in the world would those two cases be treated differently?
One is speeding and one has got an arrest warrant.
It turns out wrong. It's a wrong arrest warrant.
But one has an arrest warrant.
These are not equal.
So here's a comment that's happening right now.
And you want to ask, is this a Chinese bot?
So look at this one. So somebody named Sheena345M, we don't know if this is a real person or troll, says, why is Scott so obsessed with supporting a knee on a neck for nine minutes?
Exactly the opposite of what's happening.
But you can see that the trolls are trying to gin up an imaginary situation In which I was supporting a knee on a neck for nine minutes after I just told you, it looked to me like the officer probably killed him.
Meaning that it was the proximate cause, the last part of the cause.
We don't know if there was anything before that.
We don't know if the fentanyl was enough.
We don't know if anything else was a cause.
We just don't know that it wasn't.
So, is that defending it?
Or are you possibly not a real person and rather a troll who has come here to create as much racial animosity as possible?
Because if all you're doing is trying to create racial animosity, I'm going to assume you're a troll.
And I'm going to assume you don't work for this country because I can't believe an American would do something so bad to America.
I'm sure they would, but...
I'd like to assume that you're a foreign entity if you're trying to make something out of nothing.
All right. So watch for the Chinese trolls.
There will be a lot of them.
Oh, and here's another one.
Steve Cortez.
You all know Steve Cortez from Twitter and TV, etc.
Twitter has suspended him.
Apparently he... Oh, I just realized I'm going to get suspended if I tell you this story.
Oh, how can I tell you this story without getting suspended for the same reason that Steve Cortez got suspended?
In this case, I'd be getting suspended from YouTube.
How can I tell you?
I don't know if I can.
Can I? Well, I'll give it to you in broad strokes.
I guess you'll have to Google it yourself.
Because I don't have freedom of speech in any practical way.
I mean, legally I do, but not in any practical way on this topic.
So let's say that Steve Cortez, he cited a Stanford study.
And I won't even tell you what the topic is, because if I told you the topic, I would get kicked off of social media.
But it's a legitimate study on a Stanford, and it disagreed with the narrative.
And because he cited a legitimate organization, Stanford, just because he mentioned a study, he was kicked off of social media.
And I can't even tell you what it was about.
Because if I were to suggest that a study exists on this topic that violates the narrative, I would get kicked off of social media according to what I understand are the rules now.
Right? It was about masks.
It was about masks.
So it was a study that alleges that masks don't work.
And that the study showed that.
Now, you know my opinion, which is I don't think there are any studies, this one or any else, that tells you anything.
I believe all the studies are pretty close to worthless.
So, I would not have been on the same page with Steve Cortez on this...
But I certainly would have retweeted it, because if a legitimate organization does a study on an important topic, I would retweet that even if it didn't agree with my preconceived notions.
This is pretty important. So, and let me give you my opinion on masks.
If you're anti-mask, and I know most of you are, I'm certainly anti-mask for people who've been vaccinated.
But if you're anti-mask, and certainly young people and outdoors people, so I'm more anti-mask than mask for most of our situations, but I still think on a risk management situation, you still want to take them seriously.
Here's my take on why I still think masks are important, depending on the situation.
Fact check me on this.
There are no major industrialized countries who believe masks don't work in this context.
Am I right? If we were being fed a scientific lie, or even if this country was bad at reading scientific data, and we had gotten the wrong answer on masks, you would expect that the other countries would be all over the map.
You'd expect that there would be more countries that just said masks don't work, like Germany.
Wouldn't you expect to see Great Britain or France or Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada?
Wouldn't you expect one of those countries to say masks don't work?
I know what you're saying, Sweden, but Sweden is not the case.
I'm pretty sure Sweden says masks work.
They just would have a different opinion about when to use them, etc.
I think. Check me on that.
So I don't believe there is any country, you know, there may be some smaller countries and third world countries, but I don't believe there's any major industrial country with a robust scientific community who has a different opinion.
Right? Can anybody fact check me on that?
And I don't think Sweden counts, and states don't count.
I'm talking about entire countries.
Now, there may be places where they're playing it differently.
Sweden's a case where they're playing it differently.
It's not a case where they say masks don't work.
So, just fact check me on this.
So this is where I come down on it.
I'm no expert on masks, but in any case where there is ambiguity, you would expect that at least countries would disagree.
You can certainly see that people within countries would disagree, and that wouldn't tell you what you need to know.
But there's no entire country that has a robust scientific community that's on the other side.
Ask yourself why.
Are they all wrong?
All of them? I don't know.
So where I am on masks is, if it turns out that masks made no difference, I would be surprised, but I would not be wrong.
Does everybody understand that?
So I'm pro-mask, but later if we were to learn that they made no difference at all and they actually were bad for us, I would still be right.
Do you understand that?
Because it's a risk management decision.
And if you see all of the best experts in every country are on the same team, the risk management says to go with that team, right?
Even if it's wrong. If it turns out you're right, and you're right all along that masks don't work, that would have been a good guess.
You could be right by guessing, but let's be honest.
It wasn't based on your scientific knowledge, because we don't have any.
All right. Should be an individual decision, somebody says.
Oh, somebody says Steve is back.
Ah, good. Somebody says, are you left of Bernie the same way you identify as black?
That's a longer discussion.
But how you identify determines how people receive your message.
So from a pure communication standpoint, sometimes it's good to be on the same team you're trying to convince.
Let's see.
At least one person liked my show today.
I saw a lot of griping today.
Just looking at your comments here for a moment.
Life is risky.
Yeah, separate from the science, there's a decision of whether your individual rights should let you be maskless if you want.
Oh, okay. Well, some of you like the show.
Thanks for that. And let's go watch the rest of our day.
