Episode 1544 Scott Adams: It's a Cornucopia of Fake News Today. Watch Me Tear it Apart and Tell You What is True
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Dr. Fauci and animal cruelty
President Biden's infrastructure bill
Joe Lonsdale comments on Pete Buttigieg
Public school brainwashing
VA Governor race fake news
Did Merrick Garland sic FBI on parents?
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So many of you made it to the best place and time in the entire universe, for right now anyway.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
It's coming up soon as part of Coffee with Scott Adams.
The best time anywhere.
And question for you before we begin.
Has anybody noticed a strange energy in the world lately?
I'm not talking about electricity.
But my personal life, just the details of just getting stuff done, just went crazy in the last week.
Just crazy.
And the world seems to have gone crazy, too.
The news is just packed with stuff.
You know, sometimes you've got low news days.
The news is just packed with all kinds of crazy stuff.
But same with my personal life.
You know, I'm not talking relationships exactly, just everything.
For example, smallest example.
Every month I give my dog, Snickers, a flea pill.
A flea pill. It's easy.
You put it in a little treat, and you give it to the dog.
This month, I go to give it to her, and she chews the good stuff and spits out the pill.
And she does it several times.
I'm like, I'm going to have to trick her by getting a new kind of pill pocket, you know, a better treat, so she'll eat the whole thing without knowing there's a pill in there.
But they're out of stock, so I can't find them.
I spent weeks looking for them.
I finally find the right treat.
I got to put a pill in it, but apparently I'd thrown them away or somebody threw them away.
But they're prescription, so I can't easily replace them.
So I call my veterinarian to get the prescription, to replace the ones that are lost, to put in the pill pockets that had to be replaced for weeks of training to put into my dog.
And my veterinarian says, yeah, we can do that.
But we have a requirement that we check the dog out for, I don't know, heartworm or something.
So now I went from a process that is...
Here you go, Snickers.
Boom. Done.
To something that will take days to work out.
Like, I've got to set up an appointment.
I've got to get my dog checked out.
And do you think the veterinarian is going to find nothing wrong with my dog?
Of course they will.
So just this simple process of putting a pill in my dog turned into a life-changing event that will consume me.
Now multiply that by everything that happened in the last week.
It's just out of control.
Is anybody having the same experience or is it just a weird coincidence?
Just wondering. There's some weird energy in the world...
And I think there's too much energy and not enough places for it.
Do you feel that?
I feel that the energy in the country far exceeds the activity.
You know what I'm talking about?
Do you know how, like, you just got to do something, but you don't have anything productive to do, so you're going to go do something bad?
Because you got to do something.
You got to do something.
I feel like the country has too much energy.
Am I right? Because we can't quite do enough.
Way too much energy.
It feels like a war coming.
That's what it feels like.
It feels like the energy has to go somewhere, and it's going to go somewhere, and we don't know where it's going to go.
But as soon as there's a, I don't know, a break in the barrier that keeps us together, something's coming out.
Now, I don't think there's a civil war coming.
Nothing like that. I don't see any energy toward a civil war.
You know, there might be little spats here and there.
But something big is happening, and I don't think we can predict exactly where it's going to come out.
Just watch this. I'd say between now and the end of the year, something we didn't expect and very large will happen.
Hopefully not a war, but I think historically you end up with a war in these situations.
Hyperinflation? I don't know.
I mean, maybe, but that doesn't feel like this kind of energy.
But first, let's do the simultaneous sip, because all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or a chalice, a tiny canteen, a jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dope of being here today, the thing that makes everything better, including your antibodies.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Ah, antibodies.
Feeling good.
I would like to address some of my critics yesterday who say, number one, Scott doesn't read the comments.
Well, I read your comment, and so I'm going to address them.
I was criticized yesterday by several people who said that lately I've been acting smarter than my audience and they don't like it one bit.
Agree or disagree?
I've been acting arrogantly smarter than my audience lately, and you don't like it one bit.
Go. Disagree?
Agree? A little.
Disagree? Be right today.
Disagree? No. So you can see there's disagreement, but clearly there are people saying yes.
So even those who disagree, you can see there are plenty of people who say yes.
So, is that a valid criticism?
Is the criticism valid?
I'd say so. If there are this many people who have it, and it's an opinion, I'll call it valid.
But here's my counter to it, which is not...
I'm not saying it doesn't exist.
That's your opinion. Let me put it this way.
If people are having an impression...
A subjective experience of this.
It's not right or wrong.
It's just your experience. So you can't be wrong.
You're having an experience and you just told me what it was.
So you're right in your experience.
That's what you feel. So obviously there's something I'm doing that's causing that feeling in you.
So criticism, right on point.
But I will add this framing.
That's the whole point of watching this.
You're supposed to be watching this because you think, on the specific way that I attack the issues, Persuasion, economics usually, that I am smarter than the audience.
Otherwise you shouldn't watch.
Would there be any point of this?
Because you don't watch this just to get the news, right?
You can get the news from better sources from me.
I would think that the only reason anybody would watch it is that I'm going to say something you hadn't heard somewhere else that sounds smart enough to be worth listening to.
So my claim is not that I'm smarter than my audience.
I would never make that claim.
Because that's a misunderstanding of what intelligence is.
Intelligence very clearly is this distributed thing where there are lots of things you could be smart about.
I'm smart about some of them.
But not most of them.
Not most of them. I'm not smart about fashion.
I'm terrible at navigating, just getting from one place to another in my car.
Terrible sense of direction.
No musical talent.
I could go on and on about the things I don't know.
Never took chemistry. I never took chemistry or physics in school.
So the list of things which I don't know...
And my audience would be smarter than I, or is it smarter than me?
Grammar is another one, that you would be smarter than I, or me, or they.
But my point is, I don't believe in intelligence, per se, as some global thing.
I believe that people are intelligent about different things.
How many of you would be better at parenting than I would?
A lot of you. A lot of you.
Because you're smarter about that, right?
So I don't believe that people are smart in some universal way.
I get that IQ picks that up.
But you tend to be smart in the things you focus on and the things that your genetic propensity leads you toward.
So I can't change your impressions or your subjective opinion, but I will tell you this.
If you think in my mind...
That I'm thinking I'm smarter than you?
That's not happening. Not in my mind.
In my mind, I think there's some narrow topics that I do know more than most of you.
That's my only claim.
But there are all kinds of stuff you know that I don't know.
So arrogance doesn't really fit into my mental model, because I would assume I'm thinking I'm better than you, and I don't see any evidence of that.
I just see evidence that you're good at some things, I'm good at other things.
That's it. That's the only thing we can conclude.
There's no better than.
So if you're picking up some kind of arrogance in my approach, probably the frame you should put on it is that this is a show.
And even though I do it in a personal style, almost like I'm talking to you, you have to know that this is my public presentation, right?
It wouldn't be the same in person.
All right. And also, I heard some criticism that I never admit I'm wrong.
I would just like to suggest that the people who watch all of my content don't have that opinion.
The people who have sampled that probably do.
But I would say, and I'll just put this out there as a provocative claim, that no public figure has admitted they were wrong more than I have.
About, you know, in this topic about the news.
I don't think any public figure has admitted more times they've been wrong.
Except maybe Tucker Carlson.
Am I wrong about this?
I feel as though Tucker Carlson is one of the few people who, when he's wrong, and, you know, events prove it, that he starts his program by saying, we said X, we were totally wrong.
And then he goes on to update the story.
Haven't you seen him do that? I feel like I've seen him do that a number of times, and it always stands out as being honest.
I try to do that, but I don't know if I succeed.
All right, enough about me. Here's all the fake news.
How many of you believe that Tony Fauci...
Was behind some research, either funding it or otherwise, in animal cruelty.
In other words, they weren't testing animal cruelty, they were testing on monkeys.
How many believe that Fauci was somehow involved in torturing monkeys for science?
Anybody believe that?
Because that was on the news yesterday.
It was all over the internet.
The answer is no. Now, there's no truth to it.
There's no connection between Fauci and any monkey research or animal, dogs, anything.
So apparently there's nothing to the story.
Now, here's the standard that I'm using to decide whether it's true or not.
So it's not my magic.
Like, I'm not using magic to, like, look into the details that you can't see.
I'm using a simple standard.
That if one of the two networks, CNN or Fox News, reports it as true, and the other one debunks it, believe the debunk.
It doesn't matter which direction.
If one of them debunks a fact, and the other one says it's true, it's not true.
If both of them say it's true, it's probably true.
Probably. Not certainly, but probably.
If only one of them says it's true, it's just never true.
I haven't seen an exception.
Let me say that there could be exceptions.
I just haven't seen one. CNN says...
Well, actually, not even CNN, but Twitter's fact-check says, no, there's no connection.
So I could be wrong, but I'd say that's probably 95% chance that this story is fake news.
So that's your first fake news of the day.
Watch the pattern that emerges here.
There's a pattern emerging, and let's see if you can see it.
But don't blame me, the messenger, okay?
Because in a story or two, you're going to get pretty mad at me, if my prediction is correct.
You're going to get a little bit mad at me in a few stories, because you're going to notice the pattern, and you're not going to like it at all.
I don't think I'll have to tell you the pattern.
You're going to see it yourself. All right, here's the next one.
Well, I'm going to skip around a little bit, but I'll make the...
I'll tell you the pattern later.
So the Alex Baldwin story, every time we get a new detail, you just shake your head.
Here's the latest one. Apparently, this same armorer, the person who handles the real and fake weapons on a movie set, apparently was almost fired on a Nicolas Cage movie.
And this is what somebody said, and I quote, she didn't carry the firearm safely.
And I'm thinking to myself, huh...
What would be a way to carry firearms unsafely?
Because it seems like that would be fairly easy to carry them safely.
So how do you do it unsafely?
Well, here's the description.
She had pistols tucked under her armpits and was carrying rifles in each hand.
Okay, that would do it. Yeah, that would do it.
Yeah, pistols under each armpit while you're carrying rifles.
Yeah, that would do it.
Yep. That would be what I would call unsafe carrying of weapons.
You would have to...
And apparently she even turned around a few times so the weapons were aimed at people.
So not only were they tucked under her arm, but she was turning around so that at any given time she was...
Yeah, exactly.
I'm looking at the comments...
The only one that captures all of this is, good lord.
You know, sometimes there's an exasperated phrase that's the only one that works.
I think this one is, good lord.
That just covers it.
How did she ever get this job?
Well, apparently she is the daughter of a famous or a well-established Hollywood person who was an armorer.
So she's a legacy.
That probably had something to do with it.
Probably just people knew the parents.
So Joe Biden's got...
looks like he's negotiated with the Democrats and getting down that so-called infrastructure bill to...
To what? 1.75 billion.
Started down at 3.5 trillion with a grab bag of all these things they wanted, but they were unreasonable.
Terribly unreasonable. So now they're being negotiated back to 1.75.
And there's some optimism it will get passed.
I'm going to still bet against it.
What do you think? I'm going to bet against the 1.75 passing.
And the only reason is it has nothing to do with what's in it.
It has nothing to do with what's in the bill.
Because we don't know. Who knows what's in the frickin' bill.
I'm just going to say that I don't think Congress can do anything.
I think Congress is just permanently useless.
You're hearing my cat is whining to get out because I've got the door closed.
Boo, come up here and say hi.
Boo. Come up here.
Yeah, come up here. We'll see if I can call a cat.
That'll be a good test.
All right, so nobody knows what's in this bill, but if Biden gets this through, I'm going to try to be consistent.
If he asked for $3.5 trillion so that he could get $1.75 trillion and he succeeds...
That is going to be a very Trump-like negotiating process.
Starting high, you know, the most basic thing you should do in negotiating.
Starting so high that we got used to $3.5 trillion, didn't we?
Now, we were always horrified by it, but we got a little bit used to it, didn't we?
And by the time he says $1.75 trillion, does it sound like a lot anymore?
Biden... Biden made a trillion dollars sound like it wasn't much money.
And now he'll get to maybe go to a vote on this.
So let me be clear about this.
If Trump had done this, Let's say this bill was something I approved of.
If Trump had started at $3.5 trillion and managed to get us used to it and then get $1.75, I would think that was a damn good job.
Depending on what was in the bill, of course.
Now, separate from what's in the bill, I'm going to give Biden...
I'm going to give him an A+. I hate to tell you.
But if he pulls this off, it's an A+. For just negotiating.
Because he actually convinced us that 3.5 was a lot, and 1.75, well, that's in the ballroom.
That's in the range. That would be pretty amazing persuasion.
I'm not saying I approve of the bill, because none of us know what's in it.
Apparently, we're going to approve this bill or not, but if we do approve it, maybe then we'll find out what's in it.
You know it's garbage, don't you?
I think we know it's garbage.
All right. You can see my cat's little feeding tube there.
I have to keep that in for a little while.
All right. So I'm bored about this spending bill, the human infrastructure versus the physical infrastructure.
And I don't know if it'll ever get passed.
Here's a weird thing that's happening.
And you have to wonder if this is a Chinese plot.
There are things happening in this country that are so hard to explain in any way except, is this a Chinese plot?
Is China behind this?
Now, I'm not saying they are.
I'm just saying that...
I'm just saying it looks like it, because you can't explain why else things like this would happen.
Here's a good example. So this is...
I think this was from...
I forget where. CNN, maybe.
So these executives of the major fossil fuel companies, so mostly oil executives, etc., were coming to Congress today...
And they're going to talk about disinformation on the climate change crisis.
Now, when I read this, I said to myself, oh, this is what we need.
This will be great. All the oil executives are going to talk to Congress about all the climate change misinformation.
So I thought to myself, this is great.
This is basically the same thing that Michael Schellenberger testified to Congress about.
I assumed. Because as he testified, if we kill our...
And I think he said this.
He says it on Twitter and in his books, etc.
That if we kill our existing fossil fuel stuff too quickly, we will snuff out all our growth and our prosperity.
And the growth and prosperity are the single biggest things that cause you to clean up the planet.
So in other words, the more oil you use, the cleaner you'll get.
Because once you have an industrial base and things are working well, then you have the luxury of buying a Tesla.
So on a per-person basis, getting rich first with carbon fuels and building up your manufacturing allows you to get to a clean world, Whereas if you're a developing country, for example, you can't develop with solar and wind power.
There's not enough power. Not reliable.
And you would be there stuck in poverty forever.
Or what? So I thought that these fossil executives were going to come in and say that they were right all along, that doing a lot of fossil fuels, as much as we can, would actually be better for climate change in the long run.
Turns out they're going to do the opposite.
They're going to come in and apparently some members of Congress are going to try to get them to admit that they've been lying on various claims about their role in the crisis.
So I think that the oil executives probably have some explaining to do.
I'm sure they did some BS propaganda for their side as well.
But I think we framed this wrong, didn't we?
This looks like Chinese framing, doesn't it?
Because this is exactly what Trump warned us about with climate change being a hoax.
Now remember, when he said it was a hoax, he wasn't really directly addressing the science of it.
So much as the strategy, the political strategy, and China was going to get a big gift if we did what we were going to do, which is slow our own development while they didn't slow theirs.
So that was the hoax part, I think.
I don't want to read Trump's mind, but that would be the reasonable interpretation.
And now it looks like Congress has completely reversed from the Michael Schellenberger frame, which was the productive one, That you have to do some of these things you don't like to get to a place you do like.
And the new frame is you don't have to do the things you don't like.
You can just magically get to the new place of clean energy, but nobody knows how.
So this is pushing us into the loser frame, whereas the Schellenberger approach would be the winning frame, where you could account for all the costs and benefits and make a reasonable decision.
All right. I love this.
There's a famous venture capitalist under fire for calling new dads losers if they take months of paternity leave.
Was this Joe Lonsdale?
I think it was.
And, yeah, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
He responded to a tweet Wednesday talking about Pete Buttigieg, who took time off for his child.
And Joe Lonsdale said, quote,"...any man in an important position who takes six months of leave for a newborn is a loser." In the old days, men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future.
That's the correct masculine response.
Now, if you'd like my opinion on this...
I don't really have one.
I don't think this is a situation in which my opinion should have anything to do with you and your baby.
Do you? Do you think I should have an opinion about what you do with your baby?
No. No.
I mean, I suppose if I were in this situation, I'd want the option.
And if I'm not in the situation, I'll just look to you.
If you want the option, I think I can live with it.
I don't have a problem with it. But I just love the fact that he would say this opinion in public.
It's the saying it in public that makes it a funny story.
It's not like a lot of people weren't thinking it.
But it's hilarious that he said it in public.
Anyway... I'm not really completely defined by the men have to be masculine in every way, in every situation or anything like that.
But I think it's perfectly fine for him to say it, yes.
So I'm glad he could say it without getting cancelled.
I think he's rich enough he doesn't get cancelled.
Rasmussen has a...
Some poll results saying that the majority across political spectrums, so no matter what party you are, you're concerned about what is being taught in public schools.
Now, of course, you would be concerned in a different way if you're a Democrat versus a Republican.
But a lot of people, so 90% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats...
And 76% of the non-affiliated people are concerned that public schools may be promoting controversial beliefs and attitudes.
I feel as if these numbers tell us that the traditional school system is dead.
Maybe not right away, but it looks like we're about to enter an irreversible trend Toward getting other people's brainwashing away from your children.
Because it is brainwashing.
The only difference between the modern brainwashing and the old brainwashing...
The old brainwashing was, you know, patriotism and melting pot and everything like that.
The old brainwashing was explicitly designed to turn kids into good citizens.
You know, patriots, etc.
Now, it was brainwashing.
You could argue that it was unethical, but also militarily necessary.
To defend the homeland, you have to brainwash the children to make them patriots.
Now, you could say it's just education, but that's just word thinking.
It is what it is. We're training people who do not have critical thinking To have a specific point of view.
If you train somebody who doesn't yet have critical thinking skills into a specific point of view, it's brainwashing.
It might be productive, and that's what I'm saying it is, but it's still brainwashing.
It's not like you gave the kids some information and let them make their own decision.
So brainwashing is universal, but it used to be the kind that we pretty much all thought was a good idea.
And now they're brainwashing them in different ways.
Not everybody agrees it's a good way.
So I think that we have to develop a hybrid system that doesn't have the problems of homeschooling.
Oh yeah, there are problems. And doesn't have the problems of public school.
And I feel like it's going to be, you know, clusters of people who band together, maybe with the help of an app or some parent company, and form, I don't know, groups of 12 people for homeschooling, get together at somebody's house, put it on the big screen TV, all you need is a parent somewhere in the house.
Something like that. There's going to be some model that's neither pure homeschool nor pure public school.
That's inevitable. Alright, I've been trying not to follow this Virginia governor's race with Terry McAuliffe and somebody whose name I forget, Youngkin, okay?
And do you know this whole story is fake news?
The whole Virginia governor race, whatever you heard about it, it's fake news.
Let me give you an example. There is a governor's race.
That part's real. So I guess Terry McAuliffe at one point in the past said, when making his point about the limits of parental behavior versus the school's responsibility, he said something like, parents can't just go in and ban books on their own in the school.
Do you agree with him?
Do you agree that parents shouldn't be the ones who just unilaterally go in and say, well, there are 20 of us who hate this book, So this book is gone.
Do you agree that we shouldn't be banning books based on some small group of people thinking they should be banned?
That's what Terry McAuliffe said.
And that got turned into parents can't have any say about their school.
So that got turned into somehow he doesn't want parents to have input in the school.
That's just fake news.
Literally nobody thinks that.
Literally nobody thinks that parents should have no input in the school.
Now there's a way to do it right and there's a way to do it wrong, but literally nobody thinks that.
So if you believe that Terry McAuliffe...
I'm not supporting, by the way.
I'm just telling you what the fake news is.
If you believe that he didn't think parents should have a say in their public education, I don't think that's true.
Now, if you think you heard it, I'm not going to be able to talk you out of it.
Old fool, Scott.
That's the comment on YouTube.
You old fool. He said that.
Now, some of you are saying, my God, Scott, he said it directly.
No. No, he didn't.
What does this sound like?
It sounds exactly like when you thought, or the news, thought Trump called neo-Nazis fine people.
And the argument was, we saw it, Scott.
Don't tell us it didn't happen when we saw it.
And I'm not the only one.
Millions of people saw it.
So how could it not happen if we saw it?
We heard it, we saw it.
Easily. Easily.
Here's my statement for why, without even watching it, without watching what you watched, so I didn't watch those debates, but even without reading the transcript, without reading the transcript, without educating myself on the topic, without watching any of the videos, I'm going to say with complete confidence that there's nobody, including Terry McAuliffe, who has the opinion that you have given to him.
Nobody has that opinion.
Nobody. Not in the whole world, including Terry McAuliffe.
That's all I'm going to say.
If you believe that you saw it with your own eyes and heard it with your own ears and read it in the transcript, I say you didn't.
Okay? It's uncomfortable, isn't it?
It's pretty uncomfortable. Because the reason that you watch me is that I've been right more than I've been wrong.
I've been wrong my fair share, of course.
Of course. But it's uncomfortable, isn't it?
Because you know that my perception on this has been right more than it's wrong.
And if it differs with yours, you're saying to yourself right now, is that possible?
Could I be this positive that this really happened and it never happened?
That's what I think. I think you're positive it happened.
You're positive you saw it and it didn't happen.
Because it couldn't happen.
It's the same argument with the hoax that Trump said drink bleach or the hoax that Trump said neo-Nazis are fine people.
The reason you know it didn't happen, it couldn't happen.
It wouldn't happen with anybody, anywhere.
In any reality, those things can't happen.
So this also can't happen.
It didn't happen, in my opinion.
It's not an analogy, it's an example.
An example is slightly different than an analogy.
You can give examples to show that it happened, but it would be proper to pick on the analogy.
Here's some more. Here's Geraldo on The Five yesterday.
They were talking about inflation, and Geraldo, who's now sitting in as the, I guess, the liberal-leaning kind of player on The Five, he said that inflation is partly a good thing, Because that way employees would get raises.
So there's some pressure on employers to give raises to people.
And raises are good things.
So maybe you should say that inflation is not all bad.
It's not all bad because people got raises.
Have I ever mentioned to you that not everybody understands economics?
And a lot of these people are in the news business.
As someone quickly pointed out to him on the 5, it didn't take long, their salaries are going up, but only in the same amount as the prices are going up.
So you're not going to be able to buy more gas with your raise.
You'll buy the same as you used to be able, because the price of gas went up, too.
Now, that would be good if nothing else went up, but if everything's going up, then everybody getting a raise...
Well, it's better than not getting a raise, but it's not good.
It's not a positive.
It's just keeping up with something.
Let's talk about this story about the boy in the skirt who assaulted two times, and once in the bathroom.
Number one, you would like me to say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you were so right, so wrong...
When you said, I don't think that there's a transsexual element to the story.
But then we found out that the boy does, in fact, wear a skirt.
Now, I called him a boy, but that may be incorrect because I think he says he's non-binary.
Is that right? Non-binary?
Or was it gender fluid?
Which one was it? Gender fluid?
Gender fluid. Now, here's my understanding of the story.
The reason it's a national story...
Is it a national story because there was an assault?
Is that what makes it a national story?
No, unfortunately, because assaults are every day.
But we don't make them national stories.
Was it a national story because this is the second time he did it and the administrators or somebody in charge should have made sure he didn't do it a second time?
Is that what makes it a national story?
No, unfortunately, because repeat offenders are very, very normal.
So that didn't make it a national story.
Was it a...
Was it a national story because we were worried that, not we, because I wasn't worried, but there was a lot of worry that the transgender rights would allow people who were born with male equipment to pretend to be female and go into a woman's restroom and then do some raping.
And this looks like exactly that, doesn't it?
Exactly what you were worried about, isn't it?
Oh my God, as soon as you let these, what you would call men, in quotes, into the ladies' restroom, there's going to be sexual assaults.
And sure enough, here it was.
Is that what happened? Because I don't think that's what happened.
I think it looks like...
Here's how it looks to me.
And this is really just a framing.
So this would be an opinion, not a fact, okay?
The way it looks to me is that there was a kid who had two issues.
One issue is the either wanted attention or was gender fluid or whatever.
And then the second issue is that he was a sexual offender.
And I don't know that the two are connected.
Let me ask you this.
Could we prevent sexual assaults in the whole world by keeping men out of women's restrooms?
How much of a difference would it make?
Let's say you had some magic way to keep anybody who was born with male equipment.
They could never go into a woman's restroom forever.
That just would never happen.
How much of a difference in the world would that make in terms of sexual assaults?
Some. Maybe some.
I don't know that it would make much of a difference.
So I don't think...
Here's what it looks like to me.
It looks like the world on the right, you know, sort of the ones who are not buying into the trans rights arguments entirely, I think the people on the right were looking for the perfect story.
And this one came along, and it wasn't quite it.
But it was forced into the perfect story because they needed a perfect story to match that narrative that the trans thing is going to lead to assaults in bathrooms.
I don't think this was a trans situation, was it?
And here's my question.
Why does someone who is gender fluid get to use the other restroom?
Is that a rule?
If you're telling me that Transgenders can use the restroom of their choice.
I'd say that's one issue. You could agree or disagree, but that's a separate issue.
But gender fluid? Whoever said that gender fluid people could use whatever restroom they wanted?
Has that ever even been a conversation?
Has it? I always thought it was limited to the trans.
People who have made up their mind...
Who they want to live as.
I've never heard it applied to people who weren't sure or wanted to be a little of both.
I've never heard of that.
Have you? So it looks to me like the way this fake news was manufactured is taking something that reminded you of a trans situation but wasn't and made you think that that's what was happening.
That's what it looks like. It looks like fake news.
Now, the real part was the assault, and the real part, apparently, was the skirt, which I predicted you wouldn't find to be true.
So I was wrong in that prediction about the skirt.
But it doesn't look like it fits the model to me.
And I'm hearing here that the real story is the cover-up.
So I understand that there was a cover-up, but that doesn't make it a national story in any way whatsoever.
So all the things that you thought were important about this were really just something that happened to some individuals and it was tragic.
It doesn't look like a national story to me in any way.
Then add the America Garland part.
Oh, now this is perfect.
So suddenly, this one anecdotal story...
Makes us think about the parent of the victim of that story.
That parent caused some trouble at a school board meeting, I guess, and had to be removed.
And so that makes us think, you know, we think of this one story, and then we think, oh, there's a lot of this happening.
And then the fake news is that Merrick Garland was seeking the FBI on parents.
How many of you think that's what happened?
How many of you believe the fake news...
That Merrick Garland wrote a memo saying that the parents' school boards were sort of like domestic terrorists and they should be looked at by the FBI for their domestic terrorism stuff.
How many think that that really happened?
Okay, nothing like that happened.
Now, I'm using the same standard, which is that I'm not saying CNN's correct and Fox News is incorrect.
I'm saying that whichever says it didn't happen is right on any story.
Political story. Any political story, if one side...
It doesn't matter which it was.
Fox News or CNN. If one side says it didn't happen, you can depend on it.
It didn't happen. It doesn't matter which side said it didn't.
So here's what did happen.
There was apparently the administration worked with some national school board association and did write a letter.
So this was not Merrick Garland, but this association wrote a letter saying that these parents were like a form of domestic terrorism.
But then after the blowback, they withdrew it and apologized.
So having nothing to do with Merrick Garland, completely separate from him, some other organization called Parents Domestic Terrorists.
But separate from that, there does seem to be some kind of an uptick in maybe parental energy at these meetings.
And given that the energy and the, let's say, the divisiveness is high...
It looks like Merrick Garland was asked to make sure that the FBI could be a resource should things get out of hand.
And so Merrick Garland wrote a letter that had nothing to do with parents being domestic terrorists, but simply offered that the FBI would work with the local law enforcement should there be a reason.
Should there be a reason.
So there was no truth to the story that Merrick Garland called parents domestic terrorists, nor that he wrote a letter that would treat them as such, nor that he was behind anything that would categorize them as such and denied it completely, and there's no evidence of it.
Now, you probably watched Ted Cruz talking about it and some of the other Democrats, and the way they couched it, it made it look as though, if you saw the videos out of context, it made it seem as though Merrick Garland had, in fact, been seeking the FBI on parents and framing them as domestic terrorists in some cases.
Nothing like that ever happened.
Nothing like that ever happened.
There was a letter by the school board that was, you know, overblown and they took it back.
So that's done. That's done.
They apologized and took it back.
So that letter's done.
Nobody else mentioned parents as being domestic terrorists and nobody said the FBI should be monitoring them.
They're just available in case there is ever a situation in which it becomes domestic terrorism.
Is that wrong? No.
Maybe I wouldn't have done it.
Maybe you wouldn't have done it. But it doesn't really fit into any controversial bucket that I can find.
All right. So, this, of course, created the most wonderful situation.
So, Aaron Rupar, who is famous...
For tweeting misleading video clips.
You know, a clip out of context.
So famous for it that we even call them RUPAR videos.
So if I say somebody published a RUPAR video, you probably know, oh, that's one where they took something out of context to change its meaning.
So he properly calls out that that's what's happening.
So Rupar points out that the right is taking stuff out of context and making it look like Merrick Garland was calling parents domestic terrorists.
Nothing like that happened today.
Radzilla says, Scott is off today.
What you know for sure is that you're having a problem with what I'm saying.
What you don't know for sure is I'm wrong.
The same way I don't know for sure you're wrong.
What you know for sure is I'm saying things that were not compatible with what you thought.
But that is exactly why you watch this content.
If I said what you already believed, you could just watch Fox News because they're going to say exactly what you believe.
All right. But, so Rupar is correctly calling out that other people are Rupar-ing videos.
At the same time, he Rupar-ed a new Rupar.
He Rupard, he called people out for Ruparing on this topic, and then immediately he tweets a Rupard video, meaning Anna Context, which accuses Ted Cruz of defending a parent who did a Nazi salute.
Did that happen?
Did Ted Cruz defend a parent at a school board meeting who did a Nazi salute?
Yes. Yes.
This is how Rupar videos work.
Yes. It's in a context.
What was the context?
The context was that the person who did the salute was mocking the school board for being Nazis.
The person who did this loot and Ted Cruz are anti-Nazi and using it as an insult against the school board that was acting like Nazis in that context.
That is pretty much the opposite of what Rupar tweeted, right?
But the fact that he's calling out other people's Rupar while he's Ruparing is pretty funny.
Pretty funny. Yes, it's just free speech.
And by the way, even if this person had done a Nazi salute, you could still defend him.
You wouldn't agree with him, but you could defend it on free speech.
But that's not what happened.
That wasn't the issue.
They weren't pro-Nazi in the first place.
They were anti-Nazi to begin with.
All right, here's another fake news, in my opinion.
The whole debate about who is a woman or a man...
It's so ridiculous. So ridiculous.
We act like we're talking about the same thing, but it's a fake disagreement.
The conservatives like to say, no, it's the most basic question.
If you can have babies, you're a woman.
If you have the other equipment, you're a man, and that's it.
There's no shading it.
That's just it. The whole woman versus man thing is settled by who can reproduce and who can't.
The left doesn't use the same definition and just says, yeah, we understand the whole who can reproduce part, but they also would like somebody who feels that they're more of the other gender than they were born could have that right.
These are not disagreeing opinions.
These are two opinions that don't disagree in any way, Pretending they do.
And then people are taking sides.
It's a fake fight.
There's nobody who is pro-trans who doesn't understand that gender and reproduction were connected and blah, blah, blah.
It's not like they don't know that.
There's nothing to debate there.
They simply have a preference for changing the definition.
So here's what's not a good argument here.
I'll make an analogy because you love those.
Let's say I say, you know, this word is losing its meaning for historical reasons.
Why don't we consider changing the definition of the word?
And here are the reasons why we should change the definition.
And then the conservatives say, no, the word means X. And then the other side, okay, yeah, we agree on that.
We agree what the word has always meant.
What we're suggesting is that we update that, and here's our reason why.
And then the conservatives say, you idiot.
That's not what the word means.
And then the other side says, okay, I feel like you're not understanding what I'm saying.
I'm not arguing who can have babies and how it used to be and how that made sense.
I'm saying, here are my reasons why we should update this, You can agree with them or disagree with them, but let's talk about my reasons.
And then the conservatives say, I don't know how many times I can explain this.
That's not what the word means.
You're not even having the same fucking conversation.
So the reason I don't talk about this much is that there's nothing to talk about.
There's two people just having a conversation with themselves.
There's not even anything there.
So... Anyway, that was my take on that.
I'm going to run out of time quickly, so let me run through some things.
Wall Street Journal is having a fight with itself because their opinion section printed Trump's letter in which he made claims which the fact people don't agree with.
So I guess the news people in the journal are mad at the opinion people for printing a Trump opinion.
Now, what is an opinion section if it can't have opinions, including fake facts?
I don't know. I think I'm going to side with the opinion piece as long as the body fact-checks it.
Don't you think that opinions should be fact-checked if it's in the same publication?
What do you think of that? So I'm okay with opinions being wrong or even having fake news in them, but I think the publication that puts such an opinion in it should have a little news fact-checking.
Now, it could have more than one source because maybe the fact-checkers don't agree, and that would be ideal.
Adam Dopamine on Twitter...
I had an interesting observation which I'm going to agree with.
It goes like this.
So you know that Biden got elected by simply not appearing in public?
Biden's strongest quality was that people didn't see him talking.
And if he did, did I lose a bunch of money?
On what? I don't know what you're talking about.
No, I haven't lost a bunch of money.
I don't know what you're talking about. So Biden won by not being seen.
And lately we're seeing that Kamala Harris is sort of being de-emphasized.
Could it be that they're going to put Kamala Harris on ice so you don't see anything about her for months until Joe Biden, let's say, retires for medical reasons?
And then you don't have any current fake news or even real news about Harris.
So the idea would be that they'll keep her out of the light because the more you see her, the less you like her.
All right. This is a pretty good idea.
This just came to me, a tweet by Carmine Sabia.
He said, every Democrat voted against a mandate to vaccinate those crossing the border.
Every single one.
Tell me more about the science.
That's interesting. Now, I don't have an opinion yet because I haven't thought about it long enough, but this is a very provocative idea to require mandatory vaccinations for all immigration across the border.
If we believe in the science, you kind of have to believe in this, don't you?
If you believe in any kind of mandate and you believe in the science, wouldn't you have to be in favor of this?
Apparently, every Democrat voted against it.
Did that really happen? I don't know that there was a bill about that, but I assume Carmine knows.
That's a good question.
I'm not sure my opinion on that, because I'm opposed to mandates.
But if you're going to have mandates, why wouldn't you apply them in a rational way?
It's a good point. All right.
You think your state is awesome?
Watch this. I live in California, and there's a reason California is the best.
We had, of course, problems with forest fires here, pretty big problems.
How did we solve our forest fire problem?
Crisis. With a storm crisis.
We added a gigantic rainstorm.
To solve our other crisis.
And it did. We solved our forest fires with our rainstorm.
So thank goodness for climate change, because it probably made all that worse, so they say.
But we're even smarter than that.
You know, school choice was a big problem.
People were not into it.
Well, we solved school choice with COVID, The pandemic pretty much made everybody sick of the school system, so probably more school choice coming.
We got that going. Traffic was a gigantic problem in California, but thanks to COVID, we used that to solve the commuting problem.
And it looks like we also have an energy problem in California.
We run out of energy sometimes.
But it looks like we're going to solve the energy problem by the supply chain crisis.
The supply chain would be so bad, nobody can go anywhere and buy anything.
So... I think the energy shortage is solved as well.
So only California can solve a crisis with a crisis.
I'll bet your state didn't think of that.
You give us a crisis, we'll find another crisis to solve that crisis.
Now, you might say, but Scott, that leaves you with whatever crisis you use to solve the other one.
Sure. But is that a problem?
Not if you can solve it with another crisis.
You just keep solving things with one crisis after another...
I don't think there's anything wrong with that idea.
Is there? Alright.
There's a reverse discrimination case.
A white male marketing VP in some hospital in North Carolina got $10 million because he was fired to make room for a white woman and a black woman to replace him in his position.
And apparently he's not the only one.
In his complaint, he alleged that the same thing happened to the chief legal officer, the medical group president, the chief information officer, the patient experience officer, and the president of blah, blah, blah, something else.
They were all replaced, either by a black person or a woman, in the 12 to 18 months after him.
The jury agreed with him.
The jury agreed with him.
That his complaint was valid.
He was being replaced because of his ethnicity and his gender, and that a whole bunch of people had been replaced for that reason.
Now, let me ask you this.
I don't know if I've seen a case where people were fired to make room for diversity, but I've certainly seen lots of cases where people could only get a job if they were the right...
Ethnicity, including me.
So if you know my story, when I worked in corporate America, I was told explicitly that I couldn't be promoted because I was white and male.
Let me ask you this. If you were to compare the numbers of explicit racism of the old-fashioned way, where, let's say, somebody who's black or LGBTQ or a woman is discriminated against for who they are, In a corporate setting, let's say a big company, a big corporation, how much of that do you think you get compared to the reverse discrimination?
What do you think is the ratio of real discrimination, the classic kind, against, let's say, black Americans in particular, versus this kind where there was a white person who was discriminated?
In corporate America, not in the small businesses, that would be different.
I would say 1 to 10 or maybe 1 to 100.
Maybe one to a hundred, yeah.
Google red herring, Scott.
Make a point, will you?
Like, you're such a fucking dumbass.
Comments like that just have no purpose here.
You should just stop watching this content.
Just go away.
Somebody's over there on YouTube saying, red herring, Scott.
Red herring. I don't even know what frickin' topic you're talking about.
Could you do a little bit better than that?
Go Google red herring.
Go Google red herring. Come on.
Do better. Improve your game.
There's an antidepressant that looks like it helps with COVID. Fluvoxamine.
And maybe others too. Apparently it's an anti-inflammatory.
Interesting. What are the odds that the reason that fluvoxamine works as an antidepressant is that it is an anti-inflammatory?
What if that's the only mechanism that makes it happy?
Let me ask you this. Have you discovered that people are complaining a lot about inflammation?
In the comments, tell me.
Is there somebody in your life, and it might be you, who's complaining about inflammation a lot?
Like, everybody's talking about it.
Like, I got this inflammation.
Yeah, look at the comments.
Yes, yes, yes.
I am, yes, yes. I feel as though there might be some correlation between inflammation and depression.
And maybe anxiety. And that there's something in the environment, and maybe a lot of things, maybe our lifestyle, maybe our food, maybe a lot of things, is causing inflammation.
And I have a sneaking suspicion that inflammation makes you feel depressed.
And do you know what weed does?
It's an anti-inflammatory.
It makes you happy.
Fluvoxamine, it's an anti-inflammatory.
It makes you happy.
Pattern recognition, people.
You know, I mean, it would just be something I'm curious about.
But I'll bet if you Googled anti-inflammatory and antidepressant, you would find that somebody...
And I haven't done this. I just had this thought.
I'll bet you would find that somebody's looking into it.
Now, aspirin 2, maybe.
Yeah, aspirin 2, maybe.
All true. All true.
Prednisone. Prednisone is an anti-inflammatory and also used against COVID. But I don't know if it...
Oh, God, when I was on...
Oh, good point.
When I was on prednisone, that literally makes you happy.
And you're also very...
You have no inflammation.
That's a good example.
I wonder if...
Does ivermectin work that way?
Is ivermectin an anti-inflammatory?
I don't know. Yeah, exercise is a...
It blows up your body, right?
I don't know what you mean. All right.
Well, let's keep an eye on this because this fluvoxamine is really cheap.
And if it works, whoa-hoo!
I have a plan to make the U.S. Postal Service solvent.
Just have a premium service in which I can pay them to not deliver my mail.
I would pay the post office to stop bringing garbage to my house.
I would pay $300 a year to turn off my mail service so they won't deliver anything.
