Episode 1648 Scott Adams: Governments Are Failing and the Public is Taking Over Everywhere
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Content:
President Trump's advice for Joe Rogan
Brainwash your kids, or someone else will
Ukraine speculation
Mask mandates fading away
Rachel Maddow out, MSNBC down
Chris Christie's gigantic assumption
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And if you'd like to take it up to whatever is beyond that, and it's almost beyond imagination, all you need is a, Oh, it's a bronze. Okay.
You don't want that either. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, a steiner canteen, a glass vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Oh, we've got a problem with the audio, which I'm going to fix right now.
Because I think I know that problem.
Hold on.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, YouTube, with any luck, what I just did fixed your sound.
Anybody? Anybody?
All right, well, so we're still bad on YouTube.
Interesting. Let's see.
I've got, oh, I know the problem.
Air gap. How about now?
Anybody? Anybody?
All right. So, here's something to learn.
You know, sort of a learning moment.
The reason I use iPads instead of other things is that I just keep them on and just set up all the time.
If you make any change to your setup, you end up with this.
And yesterday I said to myself, you know, I wouldn't mind watching a show while I'm doing some drawing.
So I changed one thing on one iPad and forgot to change it back.
Don't ever be like me.
But how would you like to simultaneously sip?
Sip interruptage.
We're going to take it up from where we began.
Go! Well, I'm pretty sure the rest of the show will be better than that rocky start.
According to a Rasmussen poll, 58% of the public agree that the media is the enemy of the people.
Now, this is similar to how it's been in prior months, but every time I see this, I just shake my head.
How much of this was just Trump?
Do you remember in the earliest days when people were mocking me for saying that Trump was persuasive?
And, oh my God, the level of hate I got for suggesting that whether you liked him or didn't like him, whether you liked his policies or not, the one thing you couldn't deny is that he was persuasive.
And now 58% of the people think the news is fake.
That was him. Am I wrong?
I mean, it was all of us two, you know, piling on.
But I don't think we would be even half of that number without Trump specifically.
I don't think anybody's ever been more persuasive than that.
I mean, that is a big deal.
So we'll talk about some of the news's performance here as we go.
The latest story is that lots of news entities are reporting that Trump, quote, improperly, improperly, I say, removed documents from the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago.
Some of them included stuff like the so-called love letters with Kim Jong-un and some other stuff.
And all I have to say about this is the walls are closing in on Trump.
Yeah, you thought Russia collusion was going to take him down?
It didn't. We were all amazed.
You thought grab him by the moon was going to keep him from being president?
Nope. Didn't stop him a bit.
Did you think that the fake news about Charlottesville and drinking bleach, fake news, did you think they were going to take him out?
Nope. He escaped all that.
What about his legal problems with his taxes and his, well, mostly his taxes?
So far, it doesn't look like anything.
Well, but, you know, what about Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels?
Well, it didn't really seem to make much difference in the end.
What about all the...
I don't know.
I think we're down to this, aren't we?
That bastard improperly took documents, which are almost certainly...
Digitally saved somewhere anyway.
Am I wrong in assuming that every document is digitally archived no matter whether you have the document or not?
Am I wrong about that?
Don't you think? Wouldn't everything be digitally archived at this point?
I don't know. So I don't even know what it means to take a document out of the White House once it's been digitally stored.
And I'm just guessing.
I mean, I'm just guessing they would all be digitally archived.
But it seems reasonable.
So this is what it's come to.
All of the insurrection talk, everything.
It all came down to, well, I think some of those documents that we have digital pictures of have been improperly, improperly stored.
What are we going to do to fix this situation?
Oh, we just took them back where they were supposed to be.
That was it. That was it.
So Trump gave Joe Rogan some advice.
Trump did a press release.
And because it's Trump, I'm going to read his exact words.
Because nobody writes like he writes.
You could not write in his voice if you tried.
I mean, it would look like it was obviously a joke.
But I swear to you, nobody writes like he does.
Nobody. And it is really sensational writing.
Take it from a professional writer...
If you could write as well as Trump does, you would be a best-selling author.
He does write at that level.
It's just that he does it in such a folksy, plain manner that you don't take it that way.
But it's brilliant writing.
So here's what he said in a press release.
Rogan is an interesting and popular guy, but he's got to stop apologizing to the fake news and radical left maniacs and lunatics.
How many ways can you say you're sorry?
Joe, just go about what you do so well and don't let them make you look weak and frightened.
That's not you and never will be.
So that's very Trumpy.
And it's well-written in a Trump style.
So I like everything about that.
Basically, persuasion-wise, writing-wise, communication-wise, it's just an A+. But here's my take on it.
Remember I said that you should be careful about giving Joe Rogan advice?
Because of the obvious reason?
Whatever decisions Joe Rogan makes got him to where he is, and whatever decisions you make in life got you to where you are.
Who's doing better?
If you're doing better than Joe Rogan, well, maybe you would be exactly the person to give him some advice.
But if you're not, maybe be a little humble about the value of your advice versus the value of his own opinions.
Now, here's my take on his apology.
Some of you said it is strategically bad to apologize.
And I get that.
So I'm not going to disagree with you on this strategy.
So strategically, it probably is a bad idea to look weak and apologize.
But here's the thing I think everybody's overlooking.
What if he meant it?
Why do we discount...
I mean, think about this. We kind of discount the possibility that he was sincere...
Why? What is it that Joe Rogan has ever done in his at least public life that we know about?
What has he ever done that would suggest he would give an insincere apology?
I can't think of anything.
That would be inconsistent with basically everything we know about him.
Now that doesn't mean we're right or we can read his mind or any of that.
But just in terms of consistency...
He is, and one of the reasons he's so popular, he's one of the most credible people in the world.
Credible in the sense that you think you'll give an honest opinion, even if he's wrong.
Here's my take.
I don't think he apologized for economic reasons.
There was an economic reason.
But I think he actually felt it.
Did you get the sense that he was apologizing fakely?
I didn't get that at all.
I think that he was genuinely unhappy with how it looked.
I think he was...
Again, we can't read his mind, but I'm just...
The only thing we can look at is the consistency in his history.
If the history and the consistency suggests that any apology he gives actually he means, that is none of our business.
It isn't. It's not Trump's business.
It's not my business.
It's not your business.
If he felt, and I'm just saying if, because we'd have to speculate about his inner thoughts, but if he thought that he honestly owed an apology, that's the end of the conversation.
It doesn't matter if it's strategically smart.
It really doesn't.
Because it's not our lives to manage.
And it's not up to us to decide should he put strategy over his own sense of what is right or wrong.
I don't know. I get that strategically it was suboptimal, but maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it wasn't.
Because, again, if my podcast were anywhere near...
The success of his, I would say, well, you should take my opinion on everything.
Look at what I've done.
But again, maybe being genuine and apologizing in a way that, at least to me, looked completely genuine, maybe that is the very best thing to do.
How would you know? If it's an opinion, and his opinion's got him to where he is, and your opinion's got you to where you are, I don't know.
I think I would defer to his opinion on whether an apology was necessary or useful.
And keep in mind that he's also solving personal issues beyond the business model, right?
Because this was a problem that was not just a business problem, it was a personal problem.
So I don't judge him good or bad, effective or ineffective.
To me, that looked like something he thought he needed to do.
And if he thought he needed to do it, that's the end of the question, isn't it?
It should be. It should be the very end of it.
It's like, oh, he thought that was a good idea.
He did it for himself.
If he's happy with it, I'm happy with it.
If you don't brainwash your own kids, what's going to happen?
They don't grow up being independent thinkers.
That's not an option.
If you don't brainwash your kids, somebody's going to do it.
The school is going to do it, social media is going to do it, etc.
And I think that in our modern world, we've kind of delegated the brainwashing to the schools and the news and social media and their friends and stuff.
So at this point, kids are just like free-range chickens, it seems like.
They leave the house to go to school in the morning.
They come home, they're with their friends, they're doing homework.
You may or may not even see them before they go to bed.
You might not eat a meal together.
They're sort of being socialized without your parental guidance in a lot of cases.
But how much damage is that?
Well, it turns out that there's some thoughts by the professionals that TikTok in particular...
Is super dangerous, especially to young females.
So here's a quote from one expert, Paul Sonseri, a psychologist.
And he says a quote for a...
I think this was on CNN. He said, for a young girl who's developing her identity to be swept up into a sexual world, talking about TikTok videos, like that is hugely destructive.
He also said...
When teen girls are rewarded for their sexuality, they come to believe that their value is in how they look, he said.
He said approximately a quarter of the female patients at his clinic have produced sexualized content on TikTok.
Now, I wouldn't trust that percentage because something tells me that A quarter of everybody who's ever...
A quarter of all females probably have made sexually suggestive content on TikTok, right?
A quarter of the people using TikTok.
That sounds like just probably the right number of people in general.
And it's the 25% again, yeah.
The magic 25%.
So do you believe this?
Do you take this as sort of obviously true, or would you need some more science to make the case?
To me, I would say this is obviously true.
It looks obviously true.
The kids are obsessed by looks and sex appeal.
Obsessed. But are teenagers always obsessed by that?
Maybe they always were.
Does it really make it worse?
Probably, because it's so visual and so overwhelmingly there all the time.
So I would imagine that just the fact that it's visual and the fact that you spend so much time on it probably causes problems.
Now, here's a prediction.
You know I've made some unusual predictions, way outside the mainstream.
I'm going to make a way outside the mainstream prediction.
That social media will eventually be banned for children under a certain age.
Now, at the moment, you'd say to yourself, that can't happen because the social media companies are just too powerful.
They can just make sure they don't get banned.
I don't think so. I think that over time, it will become so obvious that it's child abuse, actual child abuse, that as soon as somebody frames it as child abuse, maybe I just did, It's sort of a one-way trip after that.
You can't really come back from that.
I think the science is going to be overwhelmingly certain that social media is absolutely dangerous for developing minds.
Or maybe there needs to be some crippled version of social media or something.
But... The age should be set around 70.
You're safe after about 70.
I think 21.
Yeah. I think age 21 would be about right for legal social media access.
All right. By the way, does anybody agree with my prediction?
How many of you think it will happen?
Because I would think most of you would disagree with that.
See some yeses and nos.
No, no. Going to be hard.
Yeah, the power of the social media companies is pretty great, and they can make us not know that what they're doing is bad for us.
So they control the harm, but also the information about the harm.
So you won't know how much damage there is if they don't tell you, and it's not in their interest to tell you.
So here's the question that I think is fascinating about the Ukraine situation.
So Putin sort of painted himself in the corner there.
He can't really attack without bad things happening to Russia, and he can't not attack.
So what's he going to do?
And here's a question I ask.
What does war look like in 2022 if the highest advanced countries are involved?
You know, the countries that can produce the best...
What happens if two of them, or at least, you know, even if it's a proxy war, what if the best weapons are turned against the armies of the other?
Because the Ukrainians might not have access to the best weapons, or maybe they do.
Would we know? Do you think we would know in public what secret, new, really good weapons the Ukrainians will have access to?
They shouldn't tell us.
If we know, then maybe it's in the context of trying to convince Russia not to attack.
But I feel like it's obvious things are going to go poorly if they attack.
I think Putin must know that.
It's going to be expensive.
So here's what I'm wondering is going to happen.
Number one, if Putin attacks the capital of Ukraine...
Wouldn't you say that he's attacking a civilian population?
You would, right?
If he takes over a city, especially the capital, it's not really army on army.
It's going to be mass casualties of civilians.
If that happens, do you think that the Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, have a moral, let's say, Let's say, are they morally...
I guess it's never moral.
Do you think that they would return the favor?
Do you think that the Ukrainians would attack a Russian city?
Now, probably not with a straight military attack, because that would be a little difficult to pull off.
But you don't think that there are already Ukrainian operatives in Russia?
I would assume so, right?
I would assume that they've penetrated Russia.
It wouldn't be that hard, especially if they have a lot of Russian-speaking people.
They look the same, speak the same.
So what would happen if these alleged speculative Ukrainians who wanted to give as good as they're getting decided to take Moscow out and they had access to the best weaponry and strategies of the United States?
I'm not saying that's true.
I'm saying it seems likely.
It seems likely that the Ukrainians would want to attack directly into the heart of Russia to make it really hurt.
I mean, if it's all out war, it's all out war, am I right?
If it's all out war, Ukrainians can attack Moscow, the population.
They can. And what would they do to...
How would they do that?
Well, I would do it with drones.
If you had one drone per each Ukrainian operative, and you had, say, dozens of operatives, and they all released their suicide drones at the same time, I'm not talking about the big ones that are the size of aircraft.
I'm talking about the ones that can carry enough weight to take out a sizable floor of a building, let's say.
I don't know how many of them they would have to drop on Moscow before Moscow said, we're out.
We don't support this war.
I don't know if they support it or if it matters.
But I feel like Russia has to calculate a certain amount of destruction in Moscow as part of their calculation.
Am I wrong? Is there any part of what I said is wrong?
And I'll just put it in more general terms.
Number one, does Ukraine have a right to attack a population center in Russia?
I say yes.
Anybody disagree? Only if they get attacked first.
Does anybody disagree that they would have the right to attack a population center?
Any disagreement at all?
I don't think so, right?
That's war. The reason you don't go to war...
Is that? I mean, more than anything, it's that one thing, because it always happens.
Yes. So if they have the right to attack, do they have the ability?
Well, I think the ability would depend on how well they could penetrate Russia, and given that they look Russian, they speak Russian, they're on the border, probably, right?
Probably. Why would the Ukrainians not have operatives in Russia?
It doesn't make sense. Russia has plenty of operatives in Ukraine, one assumes.
So if you know those two things are true, they would have the right and the, let's say, the incentive to attack Moscow, population center.
They would certainly have the people.
All they would need is the technology.
That's all they would need.
The technology exists...
All they would need is somebody to give it to them.
Could the United States, you know, covertly, supply suicide drones to Ukrainian operatives?
Totally. Does anybody think they couldn't do that?
Now, I'm not saying they would.
And maybe the United States doesn't even need to be involved.
Maybe the Ukrainians can get all the drones they want just through, I don't know, black market or whatever.
So I have a feeling that Putin's going to have to look at a lot of destruction in Moscow as the cost of attacking Ukraine.
And by the way, the Ukrainians should say that directly.
They should say that directly.
They should say that Moscow is a target if there's an invasion.
They don't have to give any details.
Just say it clearly.
If we're attacked...
If you take over our capital, you're going to lose the capital building in Moscow, or I don't know, wherever the capital is.
Who knows? They should put a target list out and say, you're going to lose these targets.
We're going to take out this, this, and this, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Not with suicide drones, right?
If they have suicide drones, there's nothing they can do to stop it.
So they can just tell you what the cost is.
We're going to take out your tallest building, we're going to take out your Your government building.
And then name a few others.
Military headquarters, whatever.
Anyway, I don't think Putin's going to attack.
I don't think he's going to attack.
And this would just be one of the reasons.
But I could be wrong about that.
The mandates seem to be bending, if not breaking...
So a number of states have now announced masking will go away.
They've given dates. Our own Governor Newsom has said that indoor masking will partially go away in terms of the state's mandates.
So the schools and the, I guess, the towns or counties can still mandate stuff, but the state of California will be out of the mandating business for masks as of.
February 15th. Now, let's say you lived in California, and you knew that, what's today, the 8th?
If you knew in one week that the mask mandate was going to be dropped, are you going to wear your mask between now and the 15th?
My mask, I haven't worn my mask since the first.
I told you all that that was my last day.
So I wore it once in a doctor's office.
That was really just a sign of respect.
It had nothing to do with anything else.
And it was brief, so I didn't care.
So, do you think that February 14th, on Valentine's Day, that people are going to wear masks when they go out to eat?
Well, I mean, we don't really...
In California, nobody really wore masks to eat anyway.
So, you know, you just walk past the hostess at that point.
So I would say that the governor really had no choice, Governor Newsom, in at least letting the mandates expire because he got caught without his mask in a very public way.
We all saw that story. So I don't think he could extend it.
I think it was politically impossible for him to extend it.
But here's what I do think.
Waiting until the 15th is weak and stupid and is just a big fuck you.
Am I right? Like, on one hand, I want to...
Support the governor in ending the mandates.
So part of my instinct is, yay, you're ending the mandates.
But then I started thinking with my actual brain and stuff.
And I say, really, are you telling me that waiting this extra week is going to make a difference?
Nobody believes that.
Literally no one, no one, no one in the whole world believes that that extra week is It's going to make a difference.
So, Governor Newsom, you fucking dick.
End it today.
You're just being a fucking dick if you don't end it today.
And guess what? It's over today.
Because you're a fucking dick.
Right? The only reason he's not ending it today...
It's because it's going to time out anyway, and he's a fucking pussy, and he's just going to let it time out so he doesn't have to make an actual decision.
It'll look like a non-decision, right?
What a weak, weak, pathetic way to run a state.
Pathetic. If you're deciding it's going to be gone next week, it's fucking gone now.
Just admit it, it's fucking over.
I'm not going to wear a fucking mask...
For a week, well, I wasn't going to wear one anyway, but who is going to wear a mask for a week when you know it's already over?
You're just being an asshole at this point, all right?
It's one thing to follow the science, and I get the fact that, you know, there's some judgment involved.
But once you've decided to end the mask mandate, just get it over with.
Pull the fucking band-aid off.
Why do you have to leave the scab for the public?
Why does the public have to pick off its scab?
Sorry, mixing analogies here.
But this is incompetence at a level that's just fuck you in your face.
It's one thing to make a mistake and you're not sure who's doing the right thing.
You're on one team and you wish it would go this way.
This isn't like that.
This has nothing to do with teamwork, politics, priorities.
This is just fuck you.
That's all it is.
This is just fuck you to the public.
Anybody disagree? Anybody?
Does anybody disagree?
This is a pure fuck you.
And it's put in the form of they're doing us a fucking favor.
Yeah, thank you for dropping the fucking mask mandate that shouldn't have been there.
And you can't do it today?
It's over today, Californians.
Californians, listen to me.
Don't put on your masks.
Just don't do it.
It's over. Your leader just gave up.
He decided that he wasn't even going to try.
I don't know why. I don't care why.
But if he's not going to even try, masks are fucking done.
And let us stop pretending that we're following the science.
Can we? Can we stop pretending?
Because there's nothing like that happening.
When you see the CDC have a different opinion than the governors, every governor has a different opinion, even when the situation is largely the same, obviously following the science is not a thing.
It's obviously not a thing.
We should have learned that by now.
So, the New York Times apparently is admitting that, in a sense, admitting that Ron DeSantis was right about not masking kids.
So the New York Times is saying get rid of the masks.
CNN is saying get rid of the masks.
That seemed to be a big...
I mean, it seemed to be a change on CNN. Maybe it's happened already.
Governors are dropping it in various states.
It is fucking over, Governor Newsom.
It's just fucking over.
Just being an asshole at this point.
There's just no other way to express it.
It's not politics anymore.
It's not science. It's not politics.
This is just asshole behavior.
Pure asshole behavior.
You take your fucking mask off at the game and pose for pictures, and then you make us wait a fucking week?
Uh-uh. Uh-uh.
That is not politics, and it's not science.
It's asshole behavior.
And you don't have to put up with it.
All right.
So what do you think about science?
Science.
Is it fair to say at this point that trust the science is just a way to launder an opinion?
It is, right? Because if trusting the science were a real thing, All the governors would be ending the mask mandates.
The CDC would agree with all the governors and all the experts, because they would just follow the science.
That was never a real thing.
Follow the real science was always propaganda.
It was never about reason or ration.
Because if we've learned anything, it's that we can't tell what the science is or where it's heading.
As long as it's human beings who are interpreting what the science said, we don't know what the science says.
We only know what a person said.
And people are not science.
People are whatever is the opposite of science.
So I think we should agree at this point that we have proven that following the science is a bad idea.
When the public and the politicians are interpreting what the science is.
And that's basically all the time.
Following the science is a good idea for who?
Follow the science is a good idea for scientists.
Right. It's a great idea for scientists.
If you're a scientist, you should probably follow the science.
I'd recommend it. But if you're the public and you know everybody's lying about what the science is or they can't tell what the science is, then it is nothing but laundering of opinion.
They're using science to launder an opinion to make it look like it's backed by something.
That's all it is. It's just laundered opinions.
Fake news. So Orange County will not be dropping the mask mandates in...
Oh, I'm sorry. Orange County will drop the mandates, as the governor is, but not Los Angeles County.
So there's a director of whatever down there, Barbara Ferrer.
She says L.A. County will not lift its mask mandate on February 15th.
Because why? She's following the science?
Does the governor have different science than they have in L.A.? This is asshole behavior.
It is asshole behavior.
We have to stop saying this is science or politics.
This is not science.
This is not politics.
It's not even close. It's just asshole behavior at this point.
Pure asshole behavior.
Nothing else. And if you even imagine or have a conversation with anybody about science at this point, you're wasting your time.
You should have a conversation about who's being an asshole, and that's it.
Speaking of assholes, Biden's science advisor, Eric Lander, quits over his behavior toward the staff.
Apparently, in a perfect simulation-related story, the guy who's the head science advisor for the administration turns out to be...
Wait for it.
Wait for it. Biden's science advisor...
Turns out to be a gigantic asshole.
A gigantic asshole.
So much of an asshole that he has special asshole requirements around him just to keep his job.
Like he needs the asshole guideline or guardrails.
Be sure if I do anything that offends you that you tell somebody.
Let me know right away.
And he keeps his job.
This was one of the promises that Biden made us.
No assholes in his administration.
Then he kept one.
Why? Because he probably needs to launder his opinions through the science.
That's why. No, that's probably not why, but it's funny to say.
So Rachel Maddow is on hiatus, which basically takes out MSNBC as a persuasive network.
As long as Rachel Maddow is out, and it's not clear that she'll come back permanently, but as long as she's out, and she has by far the most popular show, or did, on MSNBC, MSNBC is going to become a lot closer to irrelevant in the next election cycle.
What about CNN? Well, Rasmussen had a poll asking how many people regularly watch CNN. Not many.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's pretty small.
Not many. So you've got CNN that is filled with sex criminals, allegedly, and Zucker retiring, and their reputation in tatters.
And not many people watch.
And then you've got MSNBC, which gutted itself, When Rachel Maddow took her thing.
So at this point, look at the relative power of MSNBC plus CNN compared to the last election cycle.
It's really different.
Now compare Fox News' influence.
Fox News is still strong.
Am I right? And I would say at this point that the media advantage is just overwhelmingly on the right because the left just sort of fell apart on its own.
Nobody took the left down.
The left didn't need to be taken down.
It just took itself down for different reasons.
So I don't think that we have come to grips yet with how big of a difference this could be.
Because remember, nobody uses facts and science to make decisions.
We're all being brainwashed by our favorite sources.
And here's the big sea change that I don't think has been recognized yet.
It's the Roganization of America.
I keep saying that in various contexts because you keep seeing it in different contexts.
Everything is becoming about Joe Rogan.
But it's not really about Joe Rogan, is it?
You know what I mean? Because when it's about Trump, it's not really always just about Trump.
They come to symbolize a larger or something.
So Joe Rogan represents credible, credible in the sense of honest, not credible in the sense of being right about everything.
That's not a standard anybody can meet.
Would you all agree that being right about everything is not really a standard you'd expect people to meet?
Nobody's going to do that.
But you can at least get credible You can at least see both sides.
You can at least get somebody honestly trying to give you the truth.
So I think the Roganization of America is continuing, meaning that the traditional media will become less and less important, and the independent people, such as Joe Rogan, will become more important, and that there's a really big change coming into this next two elections.
Am I right? I think that the podcaster voice probably went from 20% of the persuasion to, I think in this next cycle, 40 to 60%.
What would you say?
I think that's a really big change.
And I think a crossover is going to happen.
The crossover where the independent pundits...
Are going to make more impact, persuasion-wise, than the established media.
And the reason is credibility.
People just don't believe established media anymore.
But do they believe Tim Poole?
Pretty much. Do they believe Joe Rogan?
Yep. If they watched James Altucher's stuff, he doesn't do the political stuff so much.
But do they believe him?
Yeah, yeah, totally credible.
How about Jordan Peterson?
If they watch him, you know, do something.
Yeah, totally credible.
So the independent voices are becoming more and more credible.
Their platforms are getting bigger and bigger, and the established media is going down.
Now, like I said, Fox News is clearly an exception.
Fox News is still a powerhouse, and I would argue getting stronger.
I mean, now with Gutfeld managing to basically dominate the evening hours as well, they really have a pretty good stranglehold on the top spot there.
All right. This is interesting.
You saw it with AM radio.
It started with a crutch for the left, but conservative shows ended up dominating, Anomalous says.
Interesting. All right, so...
Have you noticed that, depending on what side you're on, you'll decide that if there are a few bad apples in the barrel, that either the whole barrel is bad...
Or it's not. It just depends what team you're on.
So if you're on Team Apple, and it's proven that a few of your apples are bad, you're going to say, well, it's just a few apples.
The rest of us are great.
Don't judge us by those few bad apples.
But if you're on the other team, you're going to say, well, look at the bad apples in that bunch over there.
So, of course, none of these arguments about entire groups being bad or good are even a little bit legitimate.
And I'm going to say the same thing about Black Lives Matter.
So the way that Black Lives Matter was being looked at by the right is very similar to how the January 6th thing is being looked at by the left.
Which is, if you were to look at, let's say, the entire group of Black Lives Matter protesters, what percentage of the total protesters were literally doing a crime?
I actually don't know. But it's not more than 10%, is it?
I don't think it's more than 10%.
See, those of you who have...
I'm seeing some bigger estimates on locals.
If you have a bigger estimate, like 25, some people are guessing that.
You think that 25% of the Black Lives Matter protesters were actually committing actual crimes?
25%? I don't think it's even close to that.
I mean, I don't know. Has anybody ever measured it?
Well, let's take the same question and apply it to the January 6th.
What percentage of them on January 6th do you think really wanted to do an insurrection and really actually do some damage?
Less than 1%, maybe?
Maybe. Yeah, so...
So at what point we should have some kind of a standard?
Yes, I was on Joe Rogan.
Somebody asked me. We should have a standard of how many bad apples there are before the bunch is bad.
And so I asked, and I was just wondering how people would feel about that, so I asked a poll question.
I said, what percentage of a group needs to be bad in order for you to judge the entire group By the few.
So 1% of the people said that if 9% of them are bad...
No, I'm sorry.
9% of the respondents said if even 1% of them are bad, they're all bad.
Does that seem extreme to you?
So 9% of the people answering said if even 1% are bad, you can judge the group.
12% said only 5% is bad, you can judge the group.
27% said if 10% of them are bad, you can judge the group.
And over half said if 20% are bad, you can judge the group.
So if more than 20% are bad, I would say you can judge the group.
At the lower numbers, then it's just more of a judgment.
More of a judgment. So it doesn't look like we could even agree on how many bad apples it takes to spoil the whole bunch.
So maybe we can't have any standard for that.
But certainly 20%.
I would say 1% would be a good standard.
What do you think? What do you think if we said if fewer than 1% are the problem, then we can say the group is fine.
Would you agree with that? Do you think that more than 1% of the January 6th people had, let's say, violent intentions?
I don't know. I mean, maybe if the 1% did, the others got caught up in it.
That's something, too. Yeah, there are probably more feds than 1%, somebody says.
So I just put that question out there.
I think we have to deal with this because otherwise we end up debating absurdities in public.
I think it's absurd to say that January 6th was an insurrection or not an insurrection.
It's just absurd. What it was is a whole bunch of people who were not doing an insurrection with some number that we don't know who totally probably wanted an insurrection.
So how can you talk about that as one event?
Right. Wouldn't it be more accurate to talk about it as two events that happened at the same time?
One event was a whole bunch of people protesting who genuinely thought they were fixing the system, meaning they thought the system had given them a bad result and that the system would be stronger and more credible if they just took a pause and made sure that they got the result that they wanted to get.
Well, made sure that they had an accurate result.
Don't you think? Don't you think at least 90% had only that in mind to get the right answer?
And then 10% or maybe 1% had much worse ideas.
All right. Chris Christie...
He said this about January 6th, so he's going a little bit hard.
Well, he's going hard at Trump.
He said, January 6th was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week, overturn the election.
He wanted the election to be overturned, meaning Trump did.
Now, what do you think about that?
Let's say Christie was right.
Let's say, just hypothetically, let's say his characterization of what Trump did is exactly the way he explained it.
And I'm going to read it again, but I want to ask this question first.
Why would we assume this is bad?
Why would you assume it's bad?
I'll read it again and ask yourself, why do you assume that's bad?
That... Trump was doing exactly what Christie said, inciting a riot to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into overturning the election.
Why is that bad?
Why is it bad?
All right, I'm just looking at your answers.
All right. Here's the problem with this statement.
There's a gigantic assumption here that's unstated.
And if you don't state the gigantic assumption, I don't know what to think about it.
And the gigantic assumption was about whether the election was valid or not, and whether you could tell just by looking at it.
If the election was completely valid...
Then, yeah, what Chris Christie is saying looks pretty bad, especially if Trump knew it was valid.
In that case, it really is an insurrection and it's all bad.
But what if Trump genuinely believed that something bad had happened to the Republic, and what if he thought he was fixing it?
What if he thought he was fixing a problem, not creating one?
Well, that's different.
Now, he could be wrong or he could be right about whether there's a problem and whether he could fix it that way.
But you would think completely different of someone who incited a riot to save the republic.
Because that's not ruled out.
We have not ruled out the possibility that everybody involved thought they were saving the republic.
You would judge that a little bit differently, even if they're wrong.
Because this is a group that you don't have to worry about.
You don't have to worry about them.
You just have to show them that the election was fair.
And then they're cool. That's the opposite of an insurrection.
The opposite of an insurrection is just show me that the election was cool and we'll stop.
Okay, here's the audit.
The election was cool.
And then we go, oh, damn.
Okay. That is the opposite of an insurrection.
You could not be less insurrection-y than just show us it's real and we'll go away.
Okay. You really can't get more peaceful than that.
I mean, that's the wrong way to say it, but you know what I mean.
All right. That was the fascinating content that I had for today.
And how many of the protesters were cops?
Yeah, we'll never know. It was his duty to protect the republic.
That's right. It's like we ignore the fact that Trump's sacred duty was to protect the republic.
Now, I'm not so hypnotized that I think Trump wasn't mostly thinking about his own interests.
But the whole point of a president is that you match the country's interests with the president's.
They should be the same.
They should be. So if the president was acting in his own best interest while still in office...
Should we be surprised that that would match the public's best interest?
That shouldn't be a surprise.
So we do allow presidents to act selfishly because the system depends on it.
In other words, we want a president to be acting in a way that will get him re-elected or to get him or her a legacy.
You want them to be acting with self-interest.
That's how capitalism works.
The whole system requires self-interest.
So that's not a problem, that the president has self-interest, if it also happened to be exactly what was in the interest of the country.
And if he believed that it was fraudulent, and I think he did.
Well, let me ask you this.
How many of you think that Trump...
Believed it was a fraudulent election.
Forget about the facts for a moment.
So we're not talking about facts.
How many of you think he believed it was fraudulent?
Yeah, I'm saying almost all yeses.
Right. And I'd love to see people on the left answer that question.
Do the people on the left believe that he knew he lost and that he was trying to change the result anyway?
Because that seems to be the biggest difference in assumption of how you see this.
I don't know. I always say that given Trump's personality, given everything that he knew and thought going into the election, given the size of his rally crowds, Given the fact that he's presumably always surrounded by supporters, so he would get a very unrealistic view of his own popularity because he'd be surrounded by sycophants all the time.
And then, allegedly, he's a narcissist, right?
So he would want to have the best legacy and it would be important to him how he looked and stuff.
But I think that he honestly...
We can't read his mind, so we don't know.
But I would say that everything we know about him suggests that he thought it was really a fraudulent election.
And if you don't know the answer to that, then you don't know how to evaluate how he acted.
Because the way he acted was on whatever his assumptions were, and we don't know it.
We know he says he thinks it was fraudulent...
But, you know, he has failed to fact-check enough in the past that just because he says it, you know, even I'm not going to believe it just because he says it.
Am I right? Like, you wouldn't criticize me for that, would you?
That just because Trump says something is true, that doesn't make it true, right?
No matter how much you love the guy or love his policies...
He has a history of, let's say, hyperbole, to be kind.
But in this specific case, all evidence suggests he actually believed him, I think.
I've never heard one person even on an insider say, well, think about this.
There's not one insider who ever reported that he didn't genuinely believe it.
Think about that. Think about the number of people who have turned on him.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're just coming around, right?
Because when you think about that, think of the number of people who have absolutely just turned on him in public.
You don't think one of those people would have heard him say that he's just trying to...
You know, take over the country or something.
You don't think anybody would have seen him say, well, I don't know if it was fraudulent, but let's try to win anyway.
Somebody would have seen something like that.
Or at least seen it on the staff.
There's not even one report, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe there is not one report of anyone saying that anyone on the staff believed it was a fair election and they still wanted to overturn it.
Am I right? That is one big dog that's not barking.
Because there are leaks and there are turncoats and there are whistleblowers all over this story.
There are probably more whistleblowers on this story than maybe anything ever that we've ever seen.
And not one person has suggested that the impulse to pause the election and check it was anything but sincere.
Think about it. Not one person has even alleged that.
Not one person has alleged that it was an insincere attempt.
Was it good for the country?
That's a good argument. If you're going to argue whether it was good or bad that it happened, it doesn't look good.
It looks kind of bad to me.
But I don't think you can argue that it was sincere.
There's no way that that could have been still a secret at this point.
A year later, a year later, and you don't think Chris Christie, just to pick one, you don't think that he would have known for sure, for sure, that the people in the White House believed their own story or didn't.
He would know.
Am I right? Am I right?
Chris Christie is well enough attached, and he's clearly speaking out about the president, so he doesn't have any...
He's not giving you a fear-based opinion.
Would you agree with that?
That Christie's opinion doesn't seem that Christie is afraid of anything at this point.
It doesn't look like it.
So if he thought that they actually were lying about their belief about the election, he'd tell you.
Don't you think? Now think about the fact that I'm the first person who mentioned this to you.
The dog not barking is the one that people forget the most.
Well, that's the whole point of it, right?
But the entire media coverage of this for a year has never once said, do you notice something missing?
That not one person has suggested the administration was insincere.
Not one. Am I wrong?
Because I think by now one of you would have said, oh yeah, there was this one person.
Oh, what is this? Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Scott. So Jessica asks this.
Jessica's looking for the Shelley treatment.
Let's see if she gets it.
Hold on, hold on. Damn it.
Stop going by. Why did you support lockdowns that forced everyone to shop at a few stores, open for less than, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Why did I support lockdowns?
Jessica? What should we tell Jessica?
Jessica? About my support for the lockdowns.
Does anybody want to do this for me?
Or would you like me to do it?
Jessica, you hallucinating piece of shit.
That never happened. I never supported lockdowns.
Not once. Never came out of my voice.
Never wrote it. Never tweeted it.
Not fucking once.
Not once. So, before you come over here and spread libelous misinformation, why don't you go check your sources, check your thinking, and come back when you're less useless, okay? Was that good enough?
I know, you were waiting for the C-word, weren't you?
But unlike some of you, I treat men and women the same, with equal dignity.
I do. And if a man attacks me, I would use any word I wanted to insult that man.
If a woman attacks me, and again, if I get attacked first, there's no word I'm not going to use, publicly or privately, if I feel like it.
Now, I didn't feel like using the C word with Jessica.
She sounded like she was just misinformed.
Shelley was a different subject.
The Shelley critic that I went off on here, that was a more evil thing.
Jessica had an actual question based on a misunderstanding.
That's fair. So I didn't go as hard as it.
But I'm not going to hold back because somebody's gender.
Should I? How many of you are such backward...
Backward misogynist.
Do you think I should treat a female troll differently than a male troll in public?
Does anybody think I should treat them differently?
If they attack me first.
Right. Well, I guess I shouldn't make a difference.
Yeah, no. There's no reason I should treat them differently.
Scott, will you apologize to...
Now Jessica's going all caps.
Apologize to...
Except I couldn't read it.
Well, I apologize to what? And then it went away.
Apologize. How long are you going to blabber about this?
Oh. Okay, Jessica's being a cunt now.
Okay, Jessica, I was wrong.
You are just a fucking miserable piece of shit cunt.
So I'm going to get rid of you.
I thought she... Oh, man, I just hit the wrong button there.
