Episode 1389 Scott Adams: Ending Diplomatic Relations With China Over Fentanyl, Buy American, and Opinion Versus Brainwashing
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Content:
CRT: Key white male traits
Ending diplomatic relations with China
Labeling products by country of origin
BLM co-founder steps down
Opinions vs weaponized persuasion
NXIVM branding function
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and it features something called...
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Go! Yes, Sean Connolly, I agree with your statement.
So, let's talk about all the things.
Just before I came on, I saw a series of tweets by Christopher Rufo, R-U-F-O. And I just retweeted them so you can see them at the top of my feed or the top of his feed.
And apparently he's learned that Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest defense contractor, sent key executives to a three-day white male re-education camp.
Um, what?
What?
They didn't really send their white men to a white male re-education camp, did they?
To deconstruct their "white male culture" and atone for their "white male privilege"?
Well, Christopher has obtained the internal documents, which appear to suggest that's exactly what's happening.
And let me read some of this.
So here are some of the traits, key white male culture characteristics.
So this comes from the training program.
It says, studying the relationship between white male culture and the history of the British Isles can help American white men see which traits, traits that ensure their ancestors' survival, live on in them today.
Now, presumably, they wouldn't be talking about these traits unless they were Racist, right?
Or somehow a negative thing.
But here are these key white male cultural characteristics according to this training program.
Survivor mentality that focuses on the future.
Okay. A tendency to rugged individualism.
Okay. A can-do attitude.
All right. Operating from principles and conscience.
Focus on hard work, action, and task completion.
Striving toward success and materialism.
Measured moderation and silent strength.
Focus on status and rank over connection.
Okay. And apparently these are devastating things for other cultures.
And so white men need to be either advised of these advantages so they can correct or change them.
I don't know what.
But if you're waiting for a run, when have things gone too far?
Here we are!
Here we are. Things have gone a little too far.
So I think there's going to be some major pushback to some of these companies.
Let's talk about China.
I think it's time to end American diplomatic relations with China.
Now, that doesn't mean we can't still send the messages and deal with them, but I think we should end full diplomatic relations.
Status. Until they stop sending fentanyl over here.
Because remember, they promised they would do that.
Trump got a promise to do that.
And they did none of it.
The opening offer, simply to have a diplomatic presence, has to be stop attacking us.
Does anybody have a diplomatic relationship with somebody who is actively attacking their country?
With fentanyl. 50,000, 90,000 people, something like that, dead every year from Chinese fentanyl.
So I've told you a number of times that the government, there's some things the government just can't do for you because they've got special interests, they've got to get re-elected, etc.
There's some things that the public just has to do.
And the first thing the public needs to do is get our politicians to end diplomatic relations with China, subject to them stopping the fentanyl flow, which they could do like that.
So keep in mind, it's just a decision.
If China wanted to turn it off, we've even given them the name of the dealer.
They know where he lives.
They know his name. We gave them evidence.
They could just pick him up.
But that won't happen, because they don't want it to stop Obviously.
So we should just get rid of our diplomatic relations.
So I'm going to start pushing that lever as hard as I can.
It seems unlikely that I would succeed, but it needs to be part of the conversation.
We should at least be talking about dropping diplomatic relationship.
It should at the very least be a conversation, right?
If we decide not to, Well, let's look at that decision.
But we should be talking about it.
The fact that we're not talking about it is a giant red flag that your government is incompetent.
Completely incompetent.
Now, there might be a few people who would talk about it.
You might have your Tom Cottons.
I don't know if he'd be willing to go that far.
But we certainly need to put that offer on the table.
It's like, this is, sorry, the opening bid...
To even have relationships with the United States is stop your chemical warfare.
That's not unreasonable.
It's not even a little bit unreasonable.
It's not even a picot bit unreasonable.
It's completely within the fair, reasonable, historically compatible everything.
There's nothing wrong with cutting off, or at least threatening, to cut off diplomatic relations.
And again, we can still talk with them.
It's not like we would immediately go to a nuclear war if that happened.
Speaking of that, I told you that if we could find out what the problem was in getting products in this country labeled as to their country of origin, that I would persuade to maybe change that.
So my understanding is, since yesterday, that there is a bipartisan bill Meaning that you got your Democrats and you got your Republicans who are in favor of better labeling.
Because remember, Biden is by America.
Trump is by America.
Right? So both sides want this.
Why won't it happen?
Well, it turns out that big retailers and Amazon being at the top of the list don't want it to happen.
Now, part of it is that it would be a big burden on them.
And I think you could probably find a way to To make that burden either phased in or less of a burden.
But their argument is that it would be a burden.
And I think it would be a burden, but it might be a burden that's worth having because the fate of the whole country depends on them taking that burden.
And I think it's not that big a burden if the entire, you know, fate of the country is involved.
Take on a little burden.
Don't mind if you do.
But here's the thing.
What would it take for Congress to get the balls, even though it's bipartisan, what would it take for them to actually pass this thing, knowing that they might get resistance from the big retailers?
Well, let me throw out a suggestion, and maybe you can tell me if it's legal.
So this is not a suggestion.
It's a question.
Would it be legal to do the following?
Get a list, put Congress on notice that we're going to track who votes for it and who votes against it.
And all those who vote against the idea of labeling products so we know what comes from China, those who vote against it, could we, and it's just a question, start some kind of a GoFundMe pack that just gives all of the money raised, however much it is, to the opposition...
Of anybody who votes against it.
Or alternately, you would fund the campaigns of the ones who voted for it.
So you could go either way.
But don't you think that the public needs to take control of this decision if Congress can't get it passed on their own?
So if Congress can't get this passed, we need some kind of gigantic funding entity.
You know, it could be ten bucks a piece.
You know, we just all chip in.
It gets to be a pretty big number pretty quickly.
And if you made it a pack, could you donate all that money legally?
Just distribute it evenly to all the people who voted for it, or distribute equally to all the opponents and primary challengers for anybody who voted against it.
And just put them on record.
And the first thing we need to start with is to find out who voted for and against it.
And to let them know, before they vote, that it's going to put a big financial pressure on them in their next election.
So... It's just a question.
Could such a thing be done legally to have some kind of a fund that we could all pay into to get the government to do what we want them to do?
Because it seems to me that big companies, retailers, Amazon, etc., would have enough lobbying muscle that they could get enough politicians to say no to this.
So the only way this is going to happen Is if the public is bigger than these other forces.
So that's the question.
So if anybody has some good ideas how this could happen, but we need a list of anybody who votes against this, and we need to take them out.
Because this isn't really regular politics.
How we deal with China is not just an economic question.
It's a big economic question, but it's not really about the economics.
It's about the long-term viability of the country.
It's about being able to compete in the future with our biggest threat.
So I don't think that this situation is like a regular political situation.
And if our politicians simply are too constipated or cowardly to get this done, the public has to make them do it.
So remember, we've passed We're beyond the phase where the politicians are in charge.
They're not anymore.
The politicians are not in charge.
They're only in charge of the stuff we don't care about, right?
So if they want to, you know, pass a bill that says the new national bird is something, yeah, they can do that.
Why did I tweet out a fake Matt Gaetz story?
They used a quote from a different part of the speech, says Abe.
Let's talk about that. By the way, tweet me a correction to that if you have a correction to that.
So, that's what we're going to do with China.
There's a story about the Black Lives Matter co-founder who stepped down from the organization.
It's Patrice Cullors.
And of course, she got a little heat because...
Because she bought some real estate.
Now, of course, the fake news is reporting that she bought $3.2 million worth of real estate.
Now, when you hear that, do you say to yourself, well, she just spent $3.2 million.
I guess she's doing pretty well.
That's not really what happened.
She owns real estate worth that much, but we don't know how much is loans.
We don't know if some of it might be rentals that she's paying against the loans.
So we don't know how much money is actually involved, but it looks significant.
And she says she's going to quit to focus on her book and film deals because Black Lives Matter is working just great so she can step away now.
Now, is it too soon to call her a white supremacist?
Is that too soon?
Because my understanding is that if you act this way, you're sort of a white supremacist.
Meaning that it looks like she's just joining the power group.
She's just becoming a person who's got money and in charge and has a good situation.
I feel like she became a white supremacist.
Is that too far? Am I taking that too far?
Because I don't think I am, actually.
I don't think that's hyperbole.
If you were to just accept their description of life and just apply it to their own situation, I feel like that's fair.
Because the white supremacy thing isn't so much about an individual.
It's about a situation.
And she just became part of the situation.
So I think she just joined the white supremacists by their definition, not mine.
So that's interesting.
Did you see a video, I tweeted it around this morning, before the 2018 midterms, that both Senator, then Senator Harris, and Senator Klobuchar were both on video talking about how the voting machines could easily be hacked.
In 2018. That's right.
Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar on video, in very clear statements, saying, hey, we've got trouble here because these election machines can easily be hacked.
What does that do to your head?
Does your brain just blow up?
Because... As funny as it is to watch CNN and MSNBC gaslight the country, and they are just gaslighting you, by the way.
I used to not use that term because I used to define it the traditional way, which is somebody trying to make you crazy.
They're not trying to make you crazy.
They're just trying to sell you a different reality.
But I guess people are calling that gaslighting now, so I will adopt the common usage and So you think you're just getting gaslighted by the media until you see that the Democrats themselves are exactly the same opinion that anything can get hacked.
Because anything can get hacked.
There's no exceptions.
This whole it's not connected to the internet stuff, that's just garbage.
Because you could connect it.
You could put a flash drive in there.
It could have been connected before.
You could have an insider...
It just doesn't mean anything that is not connected to the internet.
All right. There's big news from Joe Biden.
I don't know if you saw it, but he got ice cream yesterday.
He got ice cream.
Wait, that's not the whole news.
That would be kind of weak, right?
If the whole news is...
Joe Biden went to get ice cream.
That wouldn't be much of a story.
But luckily, it's deeper than that.
We know the flavor.
And it's chocolate chocolate chip or chocolate crunch or something.
Yeah, it's chocolate chocolate chip.
So not only did he get ice cream, but we know the flavor.
And it's a pretty good example of the press coming down hard on him, I think.
Now, if President Trump...
If President Trump had gotten ice cream, and let's say he had ordered vanilla, what would people say about him?
If President Trump had ordered vanilla ice cream, that's right, racist, racist, only the white supremacists get vanilla ice cream, but not Joe Biden.
He got the extra, extra chocolate, and I think he's on brand there, so doing a good job.
I like that they show us that he's not completely institutionalized yet.
He can actually walk outside and eat an ice cream and tell people what flavor he got.
So if you thought that he was incompetent, well, look again.
Could he be incompetent and still eat an ice cream cone in public?
I don't know how.
I mean, that's pretty good evidence that he's on the ball.
He can even get ice cream.
Well, Dydon's talking also about taxing the top 1%, and I would like to say once again, I think you need to make a distinction in the top 1%.
I think that people over 50, or you could pick a number, but people who spent their whole life trying to build up a certain situation, and then you change the rules just before they retire, I don't feel that's quite fair, especially the capital gains tax part of it, before people retire.
Now, I wouldn't be so upset if it got phased in, you know, it hits the young first and there's less of it.
There's less of it as we go.
But at the moment, the Democrats are doing what they always do, which is penalizing success and penalizing hard work and completely ignoring the effect of human motivation.
There is a tax rate upon which I will quit working.
Like, literally, I will just retire.
Now, I have enough money that I don't have to work.
But I am incentivized by money, even though I have money.
And I don't know why.
I mean, it's just like a dog with a treat.
You know, if the dog's not hungry, they'll still take a treat.
They'll still do a trick for a treat.
And, yeah, I'm a little bit like that.
But if my tax rate goes to, oh god, 100, which it looks like it's going to, you know, 60% or something would be my effective tax rate.
Closer to 70 probably if you counted all my taxes.
I just don't think it would be worth working for 30 cents on the dollar.
You know, at my age and given that I don't need the money that much.
So I think I would just quit.
And I produce, I don't know, how many millions of dollars of activity, if you count the ripple effect of, you know, I make a book, somebody buys a book, etc.
So there's a ripple effect.
But I would take, just me, just one person, I would probably take 10 to 20 million dollars out of the economy the day he changes the tax rate, if you count the ripple effect.
So don't do that.
Here's something that's been bugging me all day, and it goes like this.
If you're bad at persuading, and you have an opinion, and you express your opinion in public, but you're not really good at persuading people, what would people call that?
They would just call it your opinion, right?
Here's my opinion.
It's not expressed very persuasively.
Most opinions are not.
So that's just my opinion.
But what would happen if somebody had an opinion and they were really well trained at persuasion?
So when they gave you your opinion, it was necessarily really packaged well to change your mind.
What is it then?
Is it still just an opinion?
If it's expressed in a persuasive, weaponized form that will actually change your Decisions and maybe even change your actions in life.
I would argue that that's not an opinion anymore.
I would argue that that's brainwashing.
Right? Manipulation, brainwashing.
Right. So, why is it that an untrained, unskilled person can just have an opinion, but somebody else who might even have the same opinion, but is trained and skilled, is now a brainwasher?
Because it really asks some questions about free will.
And I've been watching this second documentary.
There's a new documentary about the NXIVM alleged cult.
And I've been watching it.
It's on Starz. It's called...
What's it called?
Well, you can find it.
Just look it up. It's not the vow.
It's the new one. But I've been watching that, trying to learn all the...
Whatever persuasion tricks were used in this, and I'm picking up a lot of good stuff.
And this one really, really asks the question.
Because if you listen to the story of one of the people who's the main focus of the documentary, the woman says in her own voice, she says that she made all the decisions on her own.
But she also believes that she was sort of brainwashed and manipulated into them.
But the only part that wasn't fully disclosed seemed a little bit trivial to her complaint.
For example, when they got branded, they didn't know that it was Keith Ranieri's initials.
They were told it was some other thing.
Now, that didn't change her decision about getting branded, but I mean, maybe she would have not done it if it were initials, but maybe she would have.
I don't know. It was just something she didn't know.
She did decide to get branded.
She knew exactly what it was.
A trained physician did the branding, because it was the physician who was part of the organization, and a lot of different women did it.
And it was done in phases, so women could see that other women had done it before they did it.
So they had lots of information about it.
They could look at other people's, etc.
But there was also a point where they had to give some so-called collateral, which they were worried would be used for blackmail.
Now, there's no evidence any of it was ever used for blackmail.
But... But...
They were afraid it would be used, so that's coercive, right?
But they also were told exactly why.
They were told that they were being asked to give blackmail information so they would be obedient.
And they agreed.
They agreed to it.
So at what point does the person who's agreeing to all this have full responsibility And at what point do they not have responsibility because the person they were working with was a brainwashing manipulator?
It's sort of a weird gray area, isn't it?
A little gray area. Now, there are other charges against Keith Ranieri that involved underage girls and some other stuff, and I don't have an opinion about that stuff.
If any of that's true, that's between the legal system.
And Ranieri. So I wasn't there, so I don't know what did or didn't happen.
But you really have to ask yourself whether the cult, so to speak, has any responsibility for making their own decisions.
You know, do you believe in free will?
If you do, it feels like the people who are there, it's kind of there on them.
But if you don't, then they were led into this situation by this super good persuasion.
Now, how many of you know what was the persuasion purpose of the brands?
I want to see if you can figure this out, if you've watched me for a while.
Maybe you read Win Bigly.
Tell me, what was the persuasion purpose of the branding?
I'm going to look in the comments and see if anybody knows what that was.
Pacing and leading? No.
It's not pacing and leading.
Consistency, you're close, you're close.
Taking action, no turning backs, get in the game, a little bit, a little bit.
Commitment, sunk cost, belonging, I'm looking at all your ideas, ownership, memory, mnemonics, get in the game, group action.
Well, so there definitely was some Some influence because the other people were doing it.
That was part of it. But that's just what got them to do it.
All right, let me just tell you. Cognitive dissonance.
All right, that's the play.
Getting the brand would, in every case, trigger cognitive dissonance.
And cognitive dissonance works this way.
Hey, nobody in their right mind would get a brand, right?
Right? Even the people who got the brand would be completely aware that nobody in their right mind gets branded.
I mean, not this kind of brand.
I know it's done by some people who do it voluntarily as part of a body modification.
But nobody would get this brand if it made any sense and they were thinking, right?
But they did. So if you can get somebody to do something that even the person knows is absurd...
What happens? Cognitive dissonance.
That's the trigger.
The trigger is to get somebody to do something that they know to be irrational.
If you can get somebody to do something that they know is irrational, their brain has to rationalize it.
There are two ways that their brain will rationalize it.
Number one, man, I am really loyal to my leader.
I am so committed to this thing.
This thing is great.
This organization I'm in is so great that I would get a brand for it.
That's how great it is.
Isn't it just a confidence scheme?
I wouldn't say it's a confidence scheme.
I just wouldn't use those words, but I know what you're getting at.
No, cognitive dissonance is the play.
You get somebody to do something that's so wildly irrational that they have to explain to themselves why they did it, and then they reprogram themselves to To say it must have made sense because I'm so committed to this group.
But here's the problem.
There's no persuasion that works with everybody the same way.
There's lots of persuasion that is very consistent, and you could expect most people to be influenced in just the same way.
The other thing that can happen is that some number of these people will rationalize that they were brainwashed.
So if you get the brand and you know it's crazy and irrational, you have to rationalize it.
Most of them probably said, oh, I'm extra loyal.
This is such an important organization that I'm committed for life, blah, blah.
And probably that happened to most of them.
But you can predict that there were like 150 people, I think, in the group.
And of 150, you can predict with certainty that at least one of them is going to say, wait a minute, the reason I did it is that I was brainwashed.
Now that one was the one that there was an effort to rescue her and deprogram her.
Now let's say your normal people get a hold of you.
You know, the people from the outside that you've been cut off from.
So the normal people get a hold of you, and they say, it's crazy, it's crazy, it's crazy, and all the normal people say the same thing.
It's crazy what you did.
It doesn't make any sense. It's crazy.
You would expect that person to now reinterpret their experience as, I must have been brainwashed.
Because, yeah, you're right.
All of my friends, all my family are saying the same thing.
They're right. I would never make this decision in my right mind.
If I'd thought about it, if I knew the whole situation, I never would have done this.
Which is probably true, by the way.
They probably wouldn't have. But...
Here, Finn.
We'll take care of you.
We found a narcissist here.
Finn Chopes. And we're going to remove him.
The narcissist you can always identify because they go after the person or the personality or the way you said it.
Everybody who does that I now recognize.
It took a while to figure out that there's a specific personality characteristics that's really predictable.
So those are people who want you to think that they're better than me.
So they're going on here just to tell you that they're better than me.
That's all. That's all you needed to know.
No specific problem.
I'm just better than this guy.
So those are your peacocks.
Bye-bye, peacock.
So that's an axiom.
So one of the super chat comments is that there was some fake news on the Matt Gaetz quote.
And I saw the video, so I'll be interested.
Maybe you can tell me what's the fake news.
So be alerted.
That we have at least one report that the news I'm going to read to you is not real.
So you've been warned.
It might not be real. I did see Matt Gaetz say it in his own voice, but how many times have we been Ruppard?
The fact that you saw it on video, and you watched it with your own eyes, and you heard it with your own ears, doesn't mean it happened.
It could be that what was cut off before that or after that, there may be some context missing.
Somebody says, but it is fake.
Can you tell me how it was faked?
Was it faked with an edit?
I tweeted, replied it to you.
Well, let's see.
Because probably there's like a different...
Let's get to the bottom of this right now.
Because it certainly looked like fake news.
It was a little too on the nose.
But I had a theory about why it would be that.
So let's see if I can find those comments.
Oh, there's like a zillion comments here, though.
Let's see. I don't see anybody doubting this.
All right. Well, you've been warned that there's a counterpoint to this.
Yeah. Alright, so I don't know what the truth is.
Some people say it's fake news.
But, if it were not fake news, this is what I would say.
What is it that made President Trump, when he was running for the first election, what made him so interesting?
What was it that sucked all of the energy out of the air everywhere else?
The way that Trump did it was to be outrageous and to say things that you knew couldn't be right or that you knew were too far or that you just couldn't believe he said it.
But it was still compatible with the base.
How many people who are pro-Second Amendment, and by the way, I'm seeing lots of people saying it's fake news, so you can assume it's fake news until we sort it out, but with this many people saying it's fake news, you're probably right.
But let me make the point more generally without knowing whether this is real or not.
The general point is that Matt Gaetz would be smart enough to know that staying offensive all the way through a primary would be how he'd win.
Because you could imagine that he would say something like the Second Amendment, blah, blah, blah.
The news would want to talk about it all the time.
But the base would say, yeah, maybe the Second Amendment, right?
So a lot of people in the base would sort of silently agree with him, and that's what Trump had going for him.
A lot of people would sort of silently agree with Trump, but they wouldn't go that far themselves, and you can't look away because it's so provocative.
So Matt Gaetz has that skill.
He has the skill to make himself interesting all the time, and that's a really predictive skill for getting pretty far in a presidential race.
Alright. Can somebody tell me in the comments why it's fake news?
Is it because there was something that was clipped?
It's not a fake edit, the one I saw, is it?
Alright, so maybe somebody can tell me why they think that's fake news.
At the moment, I don't have any evidence one way or another.
Somebody says it was edited.
Well, I'm going to have to see that.
Maybe somebody has a...
A couple of videos back to back.
So it was edited.
Alright. Alright, alright.
I'll go take a look at that and let's just assume that this is not likely to be real news.
