Episode 1387 Scott Adams: Persuasion Hits and Misses, Including Hamas, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Inflation, QANON 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:
Googling "worse than Watergate guy"
Pandemic predictions review
Inflation scare stories
QANON disappeared from internet searches
Hamas leader holding kid in uniform...with gun
President Trump's NY legal issue
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
And today will be one of the best days of the entire day.
And you are here to enjoy it, so good work on that.
The first part of your day is going just the way you want it, and I think that's worth calling out.
But, but, would you like to take it up a level?
Yeah, yeah you would.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or gels, a canteen, a junk or flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And it happens now.
Mmm. You know, every now and then I think, Maybe this time it won't be as good as all the other times.
And then I'm wrong.
It is. Sometimes it's even better.
It's amazing. All right, well, let's talk about all the fake news in the news.
Starting at the top.
So I did a search this morning for worse than Watergate guy.
Carl Bernstein. And I wondered what would happen if I just typed into my search engine the phrase worse than Watergate guy.
No quote marks or anything.
And if I do that on DuckDuckGo, the front page mentions me a lot.
Because I might have been the first person to mock Carl Bernstein for being the worse than Watergate guy.
I don't know if I was first or I was just among the first to make that point.
But on DuckDuckGo, it's, you know, Scott Adams, Scott Adams said, Scott Adams said.
And then I do exactly the same search.
No quote marks on Google.
And I'm not there.
You have to look for me.
You sort of have to dig down.
Now, I'm not going to claim that Google made some kind of a decision to take my name out of that story.
And not that it matters.
Nobody's any worse for it.
It doesn't make any difference. What happens if it's not intentional?
Is that better?
I mean, when you look at the difference in a search result, a pretty basic search result of something that's in the news literally too much, and even that is wildly different in terms of even who was involved.
Think about how gigantic this effect is.
And if you imagine the worst, You say, well, there are human beings making these decisions and trying to cancel people and that sort of thing.
But what if it's not that?
What if there is no human being who is making any decisions?
It's just the algorithm.
And two algorithms give you completely different results.
These algorithms are becoming the brain of the world.
At what point does it become impractical to make any decision That would look dumb if you made a Google search.
Or just a search.
Right? We're pretty much trading ourselves as humans to not make our own decisions.
You see that, right?
Because in the old days, without internet, if you said, Scott, what are you going to decide on, I don't know, taking a vaccination or not, or anything?
And I would say something like, well, I don't have a time to go to the library and check out a book and research this topic, so I guess I'll just make up my own mind and, I don't know, guess, use my bias or something.
I wouldn't have much information.
But what happens when the Internet exists?
Well, if the Internet exists, I'm going to go search for the answer.
Scott, what are you going to do about taking a vaccination?
I don't know I'll go search for the answer.
Should I take it? Is it safe?
And then I'll probably do something that's informed by my searches.
So in a way, my human decision-making, totally flawed because I had less information, is being outsourced to an algorithm, not even to another human, to an algorithm.
And I don't know what's going to happen.
Who knows what's going to come back?
Today, for example, there's a news story.
It's a little bit early on this story, so we might find out a lot more about it.
But apparently, some Russia-linked PR agency...
We contacted influencers, social media influencers, in France and Germany, and tried to pay them to say that the Pfizer vaccine was killing people.
Now, I guess this got uncovered, so it's not going to happen, but think about this.
Somebody was willing to pay influencers to say bad stuff about a vaccine that's probably saving millions of lives.
Of course, your mind goes to, well, this is a Russia disinformation thing trying to hurt France and Germany or maybe trying to make their own vaccination look better or something.
Who knows? Maybe it's just a play on the stock values.
But this is the sort of thing where imagine that this had worked.
Imagine that these influencers had been able to do the influence that somebody tried to pay them to do.
When you did a Google search, would they come up?
Because they're influencers.
They might. So not only are we outsourcing our decision-making to algorithms, but we don't know anything about what those algorithms are being influenced by.
Is it influenced by money?
Is there somebody behind there pushing a button?
Is it just artificial intelligence?
Is it random? It's not anything.
It's just a bunch of forces coming together.
But we basically turned the process of thinking about stuff and making decisions into a completely unknowable process where you just send it into the Internet and who knows what kind of result you get or why you got it.
It certainly wouldn't be related to whether it's true.
That's the last thing that's likely to happen.
Alright, speaking of influence, Rasmussen reports that they asked how many people had, these are likely voters they usually talk to, and they say, how many of you have a very favorable opinion of Dr.
Fauci? Now, this is just the top category, just the very favorables.
Liberals, 67%.
Had a very favorable opinion of Dr.
Fauci. Conservatives, 17%.
Now, I think we're all accustomed to the fact that a political question is always going to be divided by political lines.
But what exactly...
Made the virus political.
I believe that this number, you know, this gigantic difference between 67% liberals saying that Fauci had a very favorable opinion, versus 17% for conservatives, this is this gigantic difference.
And as far as I know, there is no political element whatsoever to a virus.
I mean, we overlay that stuff, but the virus itself doesn't have any politics.
The science doesn't have any politics, per se.
Nothing that would be associated with left or right or constitutional or wokeness or anything.
Can you give me any reason why these numbers should be so different?
Is it because conservatives like to flout the law?
No. Even the way that each side acted in the pandemic was sort of opposite their normal behavior, in a way.
I mean, you would expect the liberals to say, stop putting your laws on me, I won't wear a mask.
But instead it was conservatives.
A little bit non-obvious to me.
You can make an argument that it was obvious.
But I just don't think that we're seeing anything but pure persuasion and team joining here.
I believe that the news networks tried as hard as they could to make it sort of a side-versus-side thing, because they kind of need to, and they succeeded.
It looks like the news business turned this into a political question when there's no political element to it whatsoever.
I mean, somebody has to be in charge, and they belong to a political party, but still, they're just going to tell you what the science says, and then you get to make up your mind.
It shouldn't be political at all.
But it did. It became very political.
So I feel like in a normal political question, you don't see this effect so badly.
So if somebody says, hey, what do we do about abortion?
And then you do a poll on it, you know what it's going to look like, right?
You know, the conservatives will be largely against it.
The liberals will be largely in favor of abortion.
So if there is a political element...
You know where the poll is going to come out.
But this is the weirdest thing, that we literally just sort of said, okay, what side are you going to be on?
You guys will be, like, against the vaccine, and so we'll be more for it.
I swear to God, it just looks like it was a sport, and we just picked sides.
It was like a chess match where you sat down and said, okay, do you want to be white or black?
And then it didn't matter which we picked.
You know, the Conservatives could have picked white or black, and the other team would have just been the other team.
And I don't think I've ever seen it more clearly than in this number, that this is a pure persuasion indicator.
And you can see that people are not making up their own decisions.
If you ever wanted to know that your opinions are assigned to you by the media, here it is.
These opinions were assigned to people by the media, very clearly.
More clearly than I've ever seen it.
Maple Bob says, once the censorship starts, it's in the realm of political.
Yes, but the censorship doesn't start until somebody's decided to make it political.
I mean, that's a decision.
It doesn't just happen.
Let's test our ability to predict.
So one of the weird things about the pandemic is that we didn't see it coming.
I mean, some experts did see it coming, of course.
But most of us didn't see it coming.
And then it was this completely new situation that most of us had not lived through in any meaningful way.
So because it was a fresh field and not the old stuff we're always talking about, we all got to make predictions.
And what's also interesting is that because the pandemic has sort of a limited time frame, you actually get to see how your predictions come out.
And so this is the point where you should either be building humility or arrogance, I suppose, because you can see how you did.
I'm going to...
You dismissed the lab theory.
Thank you. I wanted somebody to come on here and misrepresent me.
Because I was going to get to that anyway.
And we see the first one.
So I'm being widely misrepresented by people who say, you said that the lab theory is debunked.
Never happened. Nope.
I'm hearing it a lot.
A lot of people are saying to me, well, Scott, you said it didn't come from the lab.
Nope. Never happened.
And if you remember that that happened, you might be a narcissist.
You might be. Here's what I did say.
I said there's no way that China intentionally released a virus.
No way intentionally.
If you lose the word intentionally, you're losing everything.
It's the intentionally that I said.
Did I ever say there's no way that the virus escaped from the lab accidentally?
Of course not.
Of course I never said that.
How could I possibly know that?
And it does seem like the most likely possibility.
What are the odds?
It started really near a lab that does that kind of stuff.
So no, there will be lots of people who will tell me that, Scott, you said it wasn't the lab.
Nope. Nope.
You are having a false memory.
And you might be a narcissist, because one of the things I learned is that narcissists have exactly that kind of false memory.
Sparky says the people who planned the pandemic saw it coming.
I don't think anybody planned the pandemic, Sparky.
All right, so here are the things that I thought from the beginning or in the early days.
These were my predictions and or interpretations.
Now, some of you are going to argue that we don't know the final answer on these.
I think we do.
So I'll accept that there's a difference of opinion about whether we do know the final answer.
But here's my current view of things.
Number one, when the virus first was spotted in China, you can fact check me on this, but I was probably one of the first one or two people, public people, in the country to vigorously call for a shutdown of travel.
Can anybody confirm or deny that?
I'll put that up to public review, but I think I was the first, or among the first one or two, I think Jack Posobiec was among the first as well, to say we better close travel.
Now, I said it a week before Trump did, and Trump got in trouble for saying it so early.
All right, so I'm going to claim a victory on that.
Number two, I did say this is not a regular flu.
This is a real virus that is really going to kill you.
Some of you still disagree with that.
Marilyn says the Epoch Times revealed the extent of the virus in China.
If you're not following the Epoch Times, you really should, because they have the best view of China and On things that there could be.
So, yeah, thumbs up to the Epoch Times for that.
I said, as soon as Dr.
Fauci and the Surgeon General said, you don't need masks for this virus, I said, and I think I was the first public figure to say this, and again, I put this up to public review.
If anybody said it before I did, let me know, because I'd be interested in that.
But I believe I was the first person to say publicly and vigorously, they're lying, they know that masks work, and that they're probably trying to make us not have a run on masks.
That's probably the most accurate prediction I've ever made.
It turned out to be exactly right.
Now, some of you are going to argue, but, Scott, masks do not work.
I hear you. I hear you.
But at the moment, Every single industrial country believes they worked.
All of them. There's no exception.
So all of the people who are professionals, who can read the research better than I can, better than you can in most cases, all of the countries, all of the experts, all of them believe the masks worked, just not in every case, every place, right?
Didn't work so much outdoors, didn't make much difference if you were six feet away, and didn't spend much time indoors, whatever.
But I'm going to claim victory on that.
I know that some of you will disagree, but I would say I was completely right on masks.
And I said, in terms of the lab, I said that it might be human-made.
Now, I did not say this in public so much, but privately, I did talk to people who said, yeah, it could be human-made and we wouldn't know the difference.
So I didn't want to say that in public because I thought that might cause trouble, but I can confirm to you that privately I believed it could have been man-made.
Let's say human-made.
Let's make it less sexist.
I also told you last year at about this time that the human ingenuity would be shockingly good.
Shockingly good. So my prediction was, although we had no good idea about therapeutics and the experts were saying vaccines will take five years or whatever they were saying, I was saying that the experts were wrong and I was agreeing with Trump.
I think I agreed with Trump before Trump agreed with Trump on the fact that we would be able to do this at a very accelerated rate and that when we were done, the history would record we did something amazing.
How'd that go? Right on, right?
Now, I thought it would be more about therapeutics.
I didn't think it would be necessarily vaccinations that would be the amazing part.
But the vaccinations are literally amazing.
One of the greatest human accomplishments, I would say.
And so I'm going to claim being accurate on that.
I told you about this time last year, when it looked like we might lose our food sources, and the economy would crumble, and maybe there would be martial law and all that, I told you that we wouldn't starve, that we would figure it out, we would get through it, and the world would not end, or at least it would not be anywhere near the worst case scenario.
And I feel I was right.
I feel I was right.
Alright, I also believed, and again, I didn't make a big deal about this publicly, because it would not have been responsible to do that, but I never once disinfected anything I ever bought.
I never once disinfected anything from a grocery store.
I'm thinking about the, I don't know, after a week of trying to wear gloves, I just said, I'm not wearing gloves.
If people could get this from surfaces, I reasoned, we'd just all be dead.
You know, or at least we'd all have it.
And it seemed to be sort of obvious early on it couldn't be coming from surfaces, just because we'd all have it by then.
So I was right on that.
Surfaces don't seem to be a problem.
There was a lot of talk about hydroxychloroquine.
I was never on the side that it definitely works, and I was never on the side that it definitely doesn't.
And we still don't know.
So I'm neither right nor wrong on that, but at least I didn't commit to something that could be wrong.
I believed, without being scientific about it, I was fairly confident that all the worry about the variants not being effective, or that the vaccines wouldn't work against the variants, I believe that was probably the news being a scaremonger's.
Meaning that the worry exceeded the actual risk.
And it looks like that's the case.
It looks like the vaccinations will work against variants as well.
And I also thought that the vaccinations would be safe enough.
Could there be some danger we find out later?
Yeah. Could we find out that more people had problems with the vaccinations, health problems?
Yeah, we could.
But I feel as though we already could say that the vaccinations were a good idea.
Now, I got a vaccination, so that tells you I thought that would be the case.
I've also been telling you that this is not part of the Great Reset.
That there's not some coordinated plan to change the world based on this.
Now, of course, the liberals and Joe Biden are going to try to do as many liberal things as they can, but that's just a result of the election.
That's not because of the pandemic.
So I don't think there was ever a great reset any more than I believed QAnon, and I think that that's turned out to be true.
I also told you that it would be the public that decides when masks and social distancing is done, not the government.
And I think I'm right.
I believe the public is leading the government on the demasking, and should.
That's the right way to do that.
And I also told you that we would get to the end of the pandemic Sparky says, you believe the MSM, the mainstream media, longer than you should have.
Sparky, you need to give me a real reason, like an actual topic.
You know, what are you talking about?
Don't make global statements like that.
That's what narcissists do.
A narcissist makes a global statement like, you didn't believe or you believe the mainstream media too long.
What's that mean? Give me a specific, right?
That's just basically a complaint about me.
That's not even talking about a topic.
And by the way, that's probably projection.
So Sparky, that probably is an indication that you believed the media too long.
Don't know that for sure, but that's typically what that would predict.
And sure enough, we cannot tell whose leadership decisions made a difference.
If you think that you can tell if...
DeSantis was better than some other state.
I don't know if he can.
I just don't know if he can.
And you're saying to yourself, but Scott, DeSantis got to the same end point, not that much difference in dying.
He got to the same end point, but with much lower unemployment.
So you can't compare.
They both had roughly the same outcome of deaths.
But one of them had much better employment numbers, so that's the one that wins, right?
No. Because we don't have an employment problem.
There is no unemployment problem.
So if one state has high unemployment and one has lower unemployment, it actually tells you nothing.
Nothing. Because everybody who wants a job can get one.
It's just that in one state they're not looking for them.
Because maybe they have benefits, maybe they just don't need it for whatever reason.
But there are plenty of jobs.
Just walk down the street.
There's help wanted on every business in my town.
So, no, you cannot determine that anybody's leadership did better.
It may be true.
It could be true that leadership made a difference.
My prediction was you wouldn't be able to see it in the data.
You just wouldn't be able to sort it out.
And I think that's true. All right, so those were my predictions and how they turned out.
And I would, rather than comparing yours to mine, which is not really the point here, what you should do is compare your predictions to yourself.
How'd you do? And if you predicted everything wrong, take that into consideration next time.
Firebelly says, I read influence like you recommended.
Do you think mask usage and policy could be explained in part by social proof?
Yes, of course. Yeah, people are influenced by other people, and especially if they're experts.
So, yes, that's part of the influence.
Michael says, funny, three weeks ago you didn't believe in narcissism.
Now we're all narcissists.
Well, Michael, you are misinterpreting me, as most of you do.
And it goes like this.
The narcissism that I didn't believe in before is the same narcissism I don't believe in now.
That hasn't changed.
Specifically, The people who think they're better than you think they are.
They think well of themselves.
That alone, if that's what you wanted to call narcissism, that's sort of commonly how we think of it.
It's just somebody who's arrogant and thinks they're better than other people.
What I said was that isn't a mental problem because it can be an advantage.
So it's not a mental problem if it helps you.
It's a mental problem if it hurts you or hurts other people, I suppose.
But... When I did a deeper dive, it turns out there are this constellation of behaviors that are attributed to narcissism that I did not know operated in a consistent code-like manner, that if somebody is in that category, they will act with all of those behaviors.
Now, that was like a whole new topic.
So, did I change my mind that narcissism is real?
No. The way I defined it before, it's still not real, and science agrees with me.
The way I learned it should be defined, it has always been real, and I didn't have an opinion on it because I just didn't know about it.
So, I am better informed, but I'm not wrong about what I said before.
I'm actually completely right about that, and you can confirm it.
Just look up what experts say about Grandiose narcissism.
They will tell you it's not necessarily a problem for the person who has it.
It might make them exceed their expectations.
Galen says, if I am negatively affected by social proof, does that make me a narcissist?
Meaning if you do the opposite of the crowd?
I don't think that makes you a narcissist, but it might make you a whatever is contrarian, I guess.
All right. Have you noticed that the stories in the press about inflation are all confusing and contradictory and terrible?
Because inflation is one of those things that I think even economists don't fully understand.
So by the time a journalist tries to write about it...
By the time a journalist tries to write about inflation, they're misinterpreting somebody who's misinterpreting something, and it's just garbage by the time you're done.
So what we're seeing in the headlines is lots of scare stories about inflation, which when you dig down just a little bit, and actually it could be in the story itself, so the headline can be a scare you about inflation, and then you dig down and you find out it's just supply disruptions.
Most of it is because of the bounce back of the economy.
So the economy is bouncing back at the same time that some of the supply chains were impacted by the pandemic.
So there's just a temporary price increase because there's a supply and demand problem.
So that looks like inflation.
Our energy costs are going high because the pipeline got stopped and some other green concerns.
But that has nothing to do with inflation per se.
Those are special cases and usually temporary.
So Is there a baseline inflation?
We actually don't really know yet.
There should be. I mean, all of the forces are in play that we should see inflation.
I don't know how we could not.
But we're not seeing it yet.
We're seeing mostly special cases.
So just be aware that the headlines are sort of scaremongering about inflation at the moment, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.
You know, it could be that It's going to emerge.
We just haven't seen it exactly yet, but it's being reported as if we are.
Here's a related scary story.
Have you noticed that QAnon stuff is just missing from the internet now?
Remember all those Twitter accounts you'd see and all the QAnon people?
And you'd see them all the time, even if you were not one of them.
At least if you tweet to the people I tweet to.
And the news on Axios is that researchers from the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Lab found that the volume of QAnon content available online plummeted following the moderation changes at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. So in other words, Google, Facebook, and Twitter started looking for content that would have classic QAnon references in it and just got rid of it.
Now, they succeeded.
Now, I don't think that the world is worse off because Q went away.
And by the way, do you know that Q stopped posting?
So if you believed in Q, do you still?
Really? Because Q kind of went away.
Q's gone. So the internet and the big platforms made an entire category of thing just go away.
In this case, was it a good idea or a bad idea?
Well, it probably didn't hurt anybody.
I don't think anybody got hurt by this.
But what happens the next time they want to make something go away?
Look how easily they made this go away.
They just made it go away.
They can do this with any story.
They don't just do it on stories that probably were better off without, like QAnon.
They could do this with anything.
And I don't know what could be scarier than watching them disappear an entire category of people from the internet.
So that should alarm you.
Let's talk about the worst persuasion I've ever seen.
Honestly, good luck finding a worse example.
Rebel asked me how much I prepare for this work.
Well, I'll show you. So what I do is I copy and paste from articles and tweets.
And then I just have notes.
So I don't have too many notes about what I'm going to talk about because I usually know what my opinion is.
And I just remind myself what the topic is.
And I might put a note or two about just to remind myself what points to make.
But interesting question.
Yeah, and a lot of this is practice.
So if to do what I do now, I've been doing it four or five years now, something like that, practice makes a big difference.
Big difference. Alright, so yeah, bullet points are the only way to go here.
So Hamas, the leader, whose name is maybe Yahya Sinwar?
Are you serious?
I just noticed his last name is Sinwar.
S-I-N-W-A-R. They put together sin and war...
I made the last name of the guy who's the head of Hamas.
And his first name is Yahya.
Yahya. Sin.
War. If this is not the simulation talking to us, I don't know what is.
I mean, really. Anyway, so this asshole who's been hiding from the Israeli bombs, he decided to come out in public so people could see he's real.
And what does he decide to do?
He decides to hold up for the camera a young child And to make sure that the young child is holding the assault rifle just right and is wearing camouflage.
So he's basically holding up a child, like just a little child, with an army military gun to show that even the children are willing to die for Hamas, I guess.
And I thought to myself, what is the one thing that Hamas has going for it?
Just one thing. They have one thing going for them, which is their human shields, their children in particular.
We care more about the children just because we do.
So they had one thing to protect, one thing to get right.
Hey, Israel, you're killing our children.
It's all they had. They had one thing.
And this fucking asshole takes a Palestinian child...
And does the only thing you could do with a child to make people want to kill it?
The only thing. The only thing you could do to make an ordinary person want to, want to kill a child is to do what he did.
Dress him up as a terrorist and show that that child will kill you.
And then I say, fuck it, I'll kill that child.
I'm probably going to get kicked off of YouTube for this.
But how did you feel when you saw the kid?
Now, I don't know how it felt internally.
Did all of the Hamas people say, well, that's great, yeah, children, let's send our children to die.
Yes, yes. Is that what they said?
Because maybe, I mean, I don't know the culture well enough, maybe it worked for internally.
But he's not just persuading internally.
He's persuading the world.
And he took his only asset, the only asset, is that we cared about them.
And we cared about the children in particular.
It's all they had.
And they made me not care about their children.
Alright, now I'm exaggerating, right?
But persuasion-wise, they persuaded toward making us care less about killing their children.
Right? Do you see how bad that is?
I've never even seen leadership this bad.
I didn't know it could be this bad.
I didn't know you could even, if you tried as hard as you could to come up with what's the worst thing we can do to our own people, you'd have to look pretty hard to come up with something this bad.
Now compare that to Israel, who immediately took this and tweeted it around and said, look at this.
Israel, A+. Persuasion.
Hamas, F. You can't fail harder than this.
This is the worst persuasion I've ever seen.
Now, I'm giving it the Dilbert bad leadership, bad management label, which in America might mean something, but I don't think it'll change Hamas.
But it should be worth noting that the Perhaps one of the most public critics of management has just labeled Hamas poorly managed.
So on top of whatever the politics are, even divorcing from the politics of it all, which is hard, but you can do it, if you just look at the talent, just look at the skill, none.
None! Hamas, you just need to get some leadership there.
Fix that. Jeez.
Alright, speaking of persuasion, and speaking of Epoch Times, Adrian Norman, who is author and writer and contributes to the Epoch Times, tweeted this.
He said that books by Scott Adams, that's me, should be required reading for black conservative pundits and influencers.
Many of us, he's black so he can say this, many of us lack Real persuasion skills, thus alienating the very audience we claim to want to reach before that audience even hears the good news of conservatism.
And I would, let's say arrogantly, I will narcissistically agree with this statement that it doesn't have to be me, I mean it doesn't have to be my books that you're reading, but black America just needs to Improve their persuasion skills.
Because if you want black America to thrive, and I do, you've got to get the persuasion right.
You've got to get that right.
And they don't have it even close to being right.
And it looks like maybe they're not studying it in the right way.
So certainly, as Adrian points out, Adrian Norman points out that black conservatives, such as himself, Or finding value in learning to persuade.
So I amplify that point.
You don't have to read my books.
You could read Cialdini.
Influence is a great book.
That's a good place to start. Trump has legal problems with the state of New York.
And I was amused to watch a legal analyst on CNN. He said he wanted to warn the audience.
And it's funny that he would have to put it that way.
I'd like to caution the audience that it doesn't mean Trump's going to get, you know, convicted of anything or even indicted.
And here are the points made why Trump may not be in as big a danger as you think.
And these are interesting points.
Number one, Trump doesn't use email information.
Looks pretty smart now, doesn't it?
Trump doesn't use email.
So in order for Trump himself to be in trouble, as opposed to the organization which would be less of a jail threat to Trump, in order to show that Trump personally was aware of anything that may or may not have happened, you're going to need either, you either need him to admit it, That's not going to happen.
You need a record that he wrote, ideally, not somebody talking about him, but something that he wrote, ideally.
Could be contemporaneous notes, but I don't know that we have any.
And he doesn't use email, so there's probably nothing in writing.
And then if you don't have that, you usually depend on an insider who flips.
Most of the insiders, it's a very small number of people who have worked there for a long time.
Do you think they're going to flip?
Probably not. Probably not.
And then beyond that, I think there's going to be an opinion and a judgment question.
So here's what I don't think it is.
I don't think you're going to find like a falsified document.
We would already know about that, I think.
So I don't think you'll find a document that somebody just changed a number on, you know, something like really obvious like that.
It won't be that. I'm guessing, and this is just speculation at this point, that there's going to be a real judgment involved here.
In other words, there will be this point where somebody says, the value of this building that you said for getting a loan was X, but when you valued the business for paying property tax, you said it was a lower value.
They can't both be true, can they?
But here's the thing.
They can be. They can both be true.
They can be different numbers and both be true.
Because one is a lending context, one is a property tax context, and you do have the option of treating them differently.
In fact, it's not even uncommon.
So I think it's going to come down to some kind of a judgment call, and I don't know if anybody gets convicted for that.
It looks political.
And I tried to speak very, very carefully...
Oh, I'm going to have to sign off here real soon.
I tried to speak very carefully on this topic, which is, I feel, when I see Trump being chased legally, and I don't see strong charges, so we're not aware of any charges that look good at this point, right? I take it personally.
I feel like Trump...
It's sort of the canary in the coal mine that protects the rest of us who have ever said anything positive about him or politics or conservatism or any of that.
I feel like if Trump goes down for charges that I personally feel are bullshit, I'm going to take it personally.
Let me say that again.
If Trump does go down, or even if they try to take him down, on charges that the rest of us look at and say, that's just bullshit...
I'm taking it personally.
Like, this isn't politics anymore.
This is personal.
And let me say as clearly as I can, no violence, right?
I'm not suggesting any violence.
It doesn't help anybody.
Won't get you what you want.
Won't get you anything. Don't do any violence.
But would I act differently if I take it personally?
Yeah, I would. Yeah, I'm going to act differently.
I'm not going to do anything violent.
But I'm definitely acting differently if I take this personally.
And I would like to call out Marjorie Taylor Greene for one of the greatest services to humankind, certainly America, that I have ever seen.
I'd like you all to join me in a standing ovation.
Let me tell you why first.
Don't stand, don't clap yet.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, for all of her faults, you may have some criticisms yourself, but for all of her faults, She is doing one of the greatest things I've ever seen any American patriot ever do.
She has made the left argue that you shouldn't make Hitler analogies.
Join me now in a standing ovation for Marjorie Taylor Greene successfully making the left argue in public and consistently that it's ridiculous to make Hitler and Holocaust analogies.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And if we could just put her on Mount Rushmore, just for that.
I mean, she may do some more good things in the future, but just for that.
That's it. Just that.
Just start carving.
Just, you know, just start carving.
Putting her right up there. Because nobody's done anything better than that all year.
