Episode 1813 Scott Adams: The January 6th Narrative Has Fallen Apart. A New HOAX Has Replaced It
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
J6 committee has become the coup
J6, the worst Democrat political play, ever
"Groomer" accusations vs "racist" accusations
Republicans, the Pro-Parent party
Steve Bannon convicted, appeal pending
Things Democrats need to believe
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization, Coffee with Scott Adams, where from now, positivity.
Everywhere else you go today will be nothing but addiction and bad news, but here, here, It's addiction and good news.
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Go. So good.
Somebody noted that I seem to be able to remember other things, but I can't remember the cup or a mug or a glass thing that I do every morning.
There's a reason for that.
My memory doesn't store randomized things.
I can only store things that have context.
So I can remember a joke, for example, because if I remember the concept of the joke, Then I just connect it to other jokes and it comes out.
But I don't have any mechanism for memorizing random stuff.
So I could probably go forever without remembering that.
Well, let's talk about all the things.
So apparently the January 6th narrative has completely collapsed.
And the narrative was, we're going to prove to you that Trump knew he lost...
But tried to take over the country anyway.
Have they proven that?
Have they shown any evidence at all?
Anything? Nope.
Nope. Not a single scintilla of evidence of their primary claim.
The primary claim, he knew he lost, he was trying to take over the country anyway, has not been proven.
Not only has it not been proven...
I would say it's been debunked.
Because not only did Trump not try to take over the country, or at least there's no evidence of it, but how do you explain that Don Jr.
wasn't in on the plot?
Isn't that the funniest part?
To be a Democrat, you have to accept that Don Jr.
wasn't let in on the plot to take over the country.
Hadn't even mentioned it to him.
I mean, seriously. Seriously.
How could you hold that in your head as true?
Yeah. Trump was trying to take over the country.
You know who we never mentioned it to?
Ivanka and Don Junor.
Didn't mention it. Didn't seem to think it was important.
Come on. The narrative is so completely destroyed at this point that it appears that the Democrats are trying to tell you that that wasn't really the narrative.
The real narrative is that he didn't do enough to stop it.
And so the January 6th people have reported that there was 187 minutes in which he did nothing to try to stop it.
That's what the January 6th committee is telling the world.
Now, that 187 minutes, that's based on nothing.
They made it up.
They actually just made it up.
The New York Times and the Washington Post both have timelines in which that's not there.
I think there's about 30 minutes before he spoke and said, everybody be peaceful, go home.
30 minutes is basically the time it takes to decide you're going to speak.
So the actual evidence that the New York Times, the Washington Post, their timeline, completely debunks the second main point of the January 6th hearings, that he didn't do enough.
Yes, and he also tweeted during that time, and Twitter took down his tweets.
All right. So what do you think is the proper outcome Of a hearing in which the primary thing is not proven, in fact debunked, the primary claim that he knew he lost and he was acting to organize a coup.
That is now completely debunked by the people who are trying to prove it true.
It'd be one thing if Republicans had debunked it, But the Democrats just debunked their own theory by looking as hard as they could and producing no evidence whatsoever for it.
None. But how much evidence do they have for the waited 187 minutes claim?
Not only no evidence, it's been hard debunked by their own side.
Now what do you think should be the outcome in that situation?
Do you think Trump should be charged and jailed for what has been totally debunked?
Probably not. You probably don't think that.
Do you think that he should be, let's say, punished by voters for waiting for 187 minutes when it's now proven by lots of sources that that never happened?
Well, here's what I think.
I think the members of the January 6th committee, unless they correct it, because I'd give them time to correct it, but if they don't correct that, they should go to jail.
Now, I don't know what the crime would be, But if you're pushing a fake fact in front of the country that changes the nature of politics, who can run, who's going to be president, that's so close to insurrection or treason or something.
I don't know if it's a crime.
But if you ask me what would be justice, justice in this case would be the committee themselves going to jail.
Not being sanctioned, not being sanctioned, but actually going to jail.
I'm talking about some serious jail time.
Now, that's only if they don't correct the error that by now they know is an error.
If they stick with the he didn't do anything, I think they have to be jailed.
For what? Insurrection.
I mean, if they're trying to change politics...
By an obvious, clear lie, there won't be any question about the fact that it's a lie by the end of today.
It's an attempt to change politics without using the system.
If you're trying to change our politics without using our system, and you're not transparent about it, it would be okay if you were transparent.
The stuff Mark Elias did, allegedly, getting some rules changed before the election, that's all legal.
You can hate it, but it's all legal.
You know, the other side should do it, too.
It's legal. Do as much as you can.
That's legal. But if you do something that's clearly outside the system and you're trying to change the system, I think jail time.
I mean, I think that's a real conversation we have to have.
I think Liz Cheney should be looking at jail time, same as Kinzinger, for this.
Now, again... If they correct themselves today, they have plenty of time to do it, but if they correct themselves today, I'd say, oh, okay.
Okay, that's a mistake.
Maybe it was a mistake, but I'm willing to, you know, a 48-hour correction, I'd say that's good enough.
I don't know if it's sedition or treason or insurrection or coup or whatever it is, but it's certainly the crime that they're trying to find.
If they're looking for something that looks a lot like a coup, they are it.
They became the coup.
Maybe they didn't start that way, but they became the coup if they're trying to sell the 187 minutes.
What do you make of the fact that probably the most important question about January 6th is who was doing what about the security of the capital?
Who was doing what?
You know, who did what and when to protect the capital?
And that's primarily Pelosi's responsibility, isn't it?
Am I wrong? Nancy Pelosi was in charge of security for the Capitol.
And is she not testifying?
Has she been asked to testify?
Shouldn't they be asking her in public, you know, what did you know when and what did you do about it?
Has she ever even been interviewed about it?
Has she ever sat for an interview and just an interviewer of any kind, just in the news, said, you know, what did you do?
Why didn't you do this?
Why did you do that? How do we just sit here and watch this like it's okay?
It's okay. I mean, it's clearly they're railroading Republicans.
You know, if you have any question about Republicans being hunted, I mean, here it is.
This is a pretty obvious case.
Anyway, I think the food supply is going to be okay.
Here's my optimism for the day.
Were you worried that the country or the world, I guess, would run out of food?
It looks like it's not going to happen.
Now, part of it is a big story that Ukraine and Russia signed a deal in which the grain would go through a Turkish ownership or something briefly.
But basically, they found a way to ship at least a lot of the grain from Ukraine.
Now, that's not the full answer.
That's not the full answer, but...
I don't think the country's going to run out of food.
And it looks like our shipping situation, at the very least, they would prioritize the food for shipping, right?
Does that happen? I'm assuming that if you're a port, and you've got a hundred ships waiting, and one of them has food on it, it goes first, right?
If it's something that would spoil.
It's delayed. We have about two years under these windmill policies.
I don't know what you're talking about. Okay.
Oh, it's delayed. You mean the food shortage is delayed.
No grain was planted.
You know, I've got a feeling that the food shortage thing is exaggerated.
Food ships go to bulk terminals.
So they have their own path?
Is that what you're saying? All right.
I don't know. It's just my feeling that we're going to get past the food supply problem.
And you might not even notice it.
You might notice a few things.
Cerno disagrees with the food shortage thing.
Let's find out. So this is a good test of the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
Now, you could argue that one year is not slow.
Maybe that's too fast.
So this is a good edge case.
I think it's long enough that millions of people made millions of adjustments because they see it coming, right?
Don't you think that other places are planting more grain?
Certification predicts food issues for 2023.
I think there'll be food issues.
There'll definitely be issues.
I just don't think there's going to be mass starvation.
It's just going to be a problem we have to work through, I think.
I think. So let's compare our predictions, right?
So my prediction is that food shortage for America, we have to make that difference, right?
For America, we'll probably just be prices higher.
Which is, you know, plenty bad, but that's what it will look like, I think.
And I think there might be, you know, you might have a country that for a while things get tight, but I think we'll figure it out.
All right. Provocatively, I tweeted that so far the January 6th hearings have proven Trump was guilty of the crime of leadership.
That's what I say. I say Trump was guilty of leadership.
And I went on and said, good leaders do unpopular and risky things based on, you know, often gut instinct.
What is the right thing to do?
That's what he did.
Everything that Trump did on January 6th, at least the stuff that's confirmed, is all consistent with leadership.
Now you're saying to me, Scott, there's good leadership and there's bad leadership.
Well, yes.
But you usually don't know about that until after the point.
Wait, gross pork?
You're saying this is ridiculous sophistry before you hear the fucking argument?
Look, you stupid piece of shit.
Listen to the point.
Then make a comment.
We'll hide you on this channel and let the smarter people have a little more time.
Okay? So first you listen.
And then you form an opinion.
If you do the opposite, form an opinion, and then listen, well, you're a fucking idiot.
So, you got that going for you.
Here's my argument, which you have not yet heard.
Management is a bunch of people doing what they all agree to do.
Management and supervision.
Management and supervision refer to everybody doing what they kind of all agree should be done, but the manager is just the timekeeper and, you know, the judge and making sure it gets done.
Would you agree? Management is about doing something that everybody agrees needs to get done.
Leadership is stuff that people don't agree on.
It's leadership if people don't agree, right?
You don't need any leadership to eat a cookie, do you?
Who needs to tell you to eat a cookie if you like cookies?
Nobody. You don't need any leadership to do that.
You only need leadership to do shit you don't want to do.
I want you to grab that machine gun and run toward that...
Run toward that enemy position through that hail of bullets, and this might not be good for you, but it will be good for other people.
It will be good for other people.
That's leadership. Leadership is getting people to do things they didn't know they wanted to do or don't quite understand or need to be led to.
Now, if Trump was right, let's play a hypothetical.
We'll start with no courts have shown that there was any fraud in 2020.
Everybody on the same page?
They didn't look for it, and they weren't the right place to judge that, but they didn't find any.
It's true they didn't find any by virtue of not looking and saying they didn't have standing in most cases.
But it's true that none has been produced that is, you know, court-blessed.
So we got that. So it really comes down to what was Trump thinking?
If he was thinking that he had witnessed a rigged election, what would leadership require him to do?
What would it require him to do?
Would it require him to allow the election to be certified?
And then let me ask you this question.
If the election got certified, can you imagine any scenario that would ever be reversed, even if you found out the vote had been rigged?
I can't. I don't see any scenario which we would ever reverse a certified election.
Would we all agree with that?
I mean, not in the real world.
I mean, you can imagine some hypothetical, but not in the real world.
The Supreme Court's not going to reverse it.
It's just not going to happen. Nor do I think it should.
Like, if it turned out it was just a little bit of sketchiness.
I don't know.
I think I might defer to the system over the specific outcome.
So, here's the thing.
If Trump believed it had been rigged, what was he supposed to do?
A leader probably would have done almost exactly what he did.
Even if you don't like it.
I don't like it.
I don't like it at all.
I don't like anything about it.
But do you know what else I don't like?
Genghis Khan. Don't like him at all.
But he was a good leader.
I mean, good being, you know, in quotes.
He was effective. He was a leader.
Do you think that all of his Mongol hordes wanted to do exactly what he told them to do?
Probably not. Some of them probably wanted to stay home and do a little farming.
But he was a leader, so he got them to do it.
Now, that's an example of evil.
Now, I'm not telling you that Trump was right, because the life of a leader is if you guess right and it works out, well, then you're George Washington.
If you guess wrong...
And it doesn't work out, well, then you're a loser.
But it's still leadership.
Right? It's still leadership even if it doesn't work.
What Trump was doing was not expected, not normal, not part of the normal system.
That's the reason there's a whole January 6th thing, right?
Because he was outside the system.
Outside the system was the only place he had to operate.
Right? If he operated within the system, you knew what the outcome would be, a certified election.
He only had outside the system.
Now, is George Washington a hero or a traitor?
Sort of both.
Sort of both. But it turns out he was right, and he won.
So George Washington won, so he gets to be a hero and a leader.
What if he lost?
What? Would you say he was a leader?
Yes. Yes, he was still a leader.
But George Washington would have been a loser, and history would have judged him poorly, I guess, if he'd lost.
There's a troll on YouTube who's trying to use my actual accurate age as my insult.
How does that work?
What, are you not going to get older?
There's somebody here who thinks he's immune from aging, I think.
You know, if you get to my age and you still have a livestream audience, you better pat yourself on the fucking back, because we never heard of you.
I don't know what age you are, but you're not exactly making a dent in the universe here.
So maybe pick up your game a little bit and come back.
Alright, well, so I don't defend what Trump did or did not do on January 6th, so I want to make that very clear.
I'm just putting it in its accurate box.
If Trump had stopped the election, let's say delayed, if he had delayed the election certification, and, and this is a big if, I don't think it would have happened, and found out that the election was wrong, you know, rigged, what would you say then?
I think he'd be a hero, wouldn't he?
In other words, if he'd been right, and we don't know he was wrong, I would say we probably do know, I'm not sure about this, I think we do know that if they had delayed the kind of delay they were asking for, sort of a normal audit recount of the votes, probably wouldn't have made any difference, right?
So I think if he'd gotten a delay, It would have just gone back to where it was.
They would have done the recount.
It would have been the same result.
Because the only things you could recount are things that got counted in the first place.
Can you recount a missing ballot?
How do you do that? If a ballot never makes it to the...
I don't know if there's a way to do that.
But if a ballot never gets run through the counting machine, how do you recount it if it's just gone?
How in the world can you know an election was rigged?
You can only know you didn't find it.
The only thing you can know is you didn't find any problems.
That's all you can know. So I would like to argue that what has been proven by January 6th is that Trump did what a leader with a strong intuition, unproven, but a strong intuition did, That he needed to go outside the system to fix a wrong.
And then he did.
He didn't fix it, but it looks like he operated on his assumption.
And I would say we don't know his assumption was wrong.
We only know it hasn't been proven right.
So at the moment, he is still in the...
In my opinion, he's still in the...
What is the cat that's half dead box?
What's the name of that? Why am I blanking on that?
The cat is half dead and half alive.
That's a Schrodinger's cat, yeah.
It's sort of a Schrodinger's cat.
If you knew what he was thinking, well, then you'd know if the cat was alive or dead.
But you don't. You don't.
I mean, I assume he was thinking he was right.
But the January 6th people are thinking he assumed that he was just lying.
No evidence of that.
All right, there's some weird thing going on with the word groomer and Twitter and...
So as you know, a lot of people on the political right have been using that word groomer to refer to people trying to teach young children about the, let's say the...
What would I say?
The... The full diversity of gender and sexuality.
And that the people on the right are saying, hey, don't teach our children all these things.
They're too early. Leave that to us.
That's not for the school to do.
And that maybe what you're doing is grooming them, meaning making children friendly to some future encounter that maybe they would not otherwise be friendly to.
Is that grooming? Well, I think it's a stretch of the word, but I would not condone it, except that it really is just the response to racists, isn't it?
Groomer is just that thing that when you get called a groomer you can't get it off because the accusation is as good as the fact.
Same with a racist.
Once you've been called a racist and it gets on the internet, it doesn't matter that you're not.
I mean, that's irrelevant.
So, same way, it doesn't matter if the people being accused are actually groomers, that's their intent, or anything.
It doesn't matter because the accusation is damning enough.
So, while I disagree with the use, and I don't believe, have you ever heard me use it?
I've never called anybody a groomer, have I? I believe I've never used that.
Not in a tweet, not on a live stream.
It's not something I would say.
It's not in my domain of things I would naturally go to.
I'll talk about it, but I'm not going to call somebody a groomer.
Because that assumes something about their inner thoughts that I don't know is an evidence.
But here's what the weird, ironic thing is.
Just as the January 6th hearings have probably made it a guarantee that Trump will return to office, that's my opinion.
In my opinion, the January 6th thing...
Let me explain this, and then I'll digress back to the groomer thing.
I've told you about the Jerry Spence.
He's a famous defense attorney, retired now, I assume.
And if he's still alive, I don't know.
He's pretty old. But he taught us that if you want to win a case for your client, he was usually working for the person who was injured, he takes the jury and he makes them imagine they're in the place of the person who was victimized.
You put them in the story.
If you put somebody in the story, they will abandon their logical feeling about the story and they'll replace it with the emotions that they got when they were imagining themselves as the victim.
And apparently that works pretty much every time.
It's like a really strong, really strong persuasion.
Now think what the January 6th people did accidentally.
Think about all the you-are-there videos they showed, like video from within the crowd.
They were trying, intentionally, to put you into the crowd, were they not?
Check me on that. Were they not trying to put you into the crowd so you could feel the danger?
You could feel the violence, right?
That was the whole point. They put you in the crowd.
Here's what they didn't count on.
Who did you identify with?
And by you, I mean you.
Like the people watching this live stream who largely are going to be right-friendly or right-leaning a little bit.
Most of you. Not all of you.
Right. If you were a Republican, or if you were a Trump supporter, and you watched the January 6th hearings, you say to yourself two things.
Oh my God, they're trying to hunt and jail people like me.
Just like me. People who believe there was something wrong with the election, if that's what you believe, you say, oh my God, everybody there is just like me.
They look like me, they talk like me, they believe what I believe, and actually they're doing things that I would have done.
Maybe I didn't go to Washington, but I would have, under the right conditions.
So who are one third of the country, let's say the Republicans who are Trump friendly, one third of the country is watching this and they put themselves in the wrong people.
Wrong in terms of the intentions of the January 6th hearing.
Their intention was to make you identify with either the politicians.
Think how stupid this is.
The point of it was Congress is showing you this to hope that you would identify with members of Congress.
Do you see it yet?
They're showing you the video to get you to identify with the members of Congress, to feel how they felt when all this violence was happening.
Was that smart?
Because Congress feels more like the enemy, doesn't it?
Who exactly identifies with the enemy?
Nobody. They identify with themselves.
And they just saw a whole bunch of themselves trying to get something done and being demonized for it.
Now, do you believe that it's backfiring?
Well, let me ask you something.
Prior to the January 6th hearings, if you asked me would I support Trump for president, my answer was, hell no.
Too old, too divisive, time for something new.
After about eight weeks of listening to the January 6th show trial, do you know what my current opinion is?
We need Trump again.
Because what is happening, he's the only person who probably has the balls to do something about it.
And if you said to me, Scott, you know, all those things you don't want to happen again, all the division, you know, all the things happen to your own career.
I mean, my career got, like, hammered just by saying anything good about the Trump experience.
And what I feel is I'm under attack.
I feel that I'm under attack.
And I feel that Trump is literally the only person who would do anything about it.
And so my opinion of him has gone way up.
I don't know. It's probably a confirmation bias.
There's a psychological phenomenon that's happening in my head that I'm aware of.
Meaning that I am abandoning my rational thought because they're making me.
Like the Democrats are making me abandon my rational thought.
My rational thought says, we don't want another Trump.
Do you know what my irrational thought is?
It goes like this.
You motherfuckers.
You fucking assholes.
If you make me look like those coup plotters one more day, I'm going to give you four more years of Trump, and I'm going to shove him up your ass.
Like the gerbil from hell.
And I'm going to love it.
And you know what?
It might cost me a little bit more in my career.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
Yeah, it might cost me another 20% off my career.
Yeah, if you make me look like those fucking coup plotters again, I mean, that's your narrative of it.
That's not what they were. If you do that to me another few fucking weeks, I'm going to make sure that Trump gets elected, and I'm going to shove him all the way up your ass like a crazed gerbil up of Richard Gere's ass, allegedly. Allegedly.
So just keep begging for it, right?
Just keep begging for it, you fucking idiots.
If you beg for it, I'll give it to you.
But you are begging right now.
You are fucking begging for this.
Keep begging. I'll give you exactly what you want.
So I think this play by the January Sixers will go in the history books as one of the worst political plays of all time.
I think they've guaranteed Trump a landslide.
I wasn't even sure he'd get nominated.
Two months ago, I wasn't sure he could get the nomination.
Today, I don't see how he loses.
I really don't.
I mean, it's hard for you to imagine a scenario that he's not president again.
Yeah. So, good job there on bad persuasion Democrats making us try to...
They literally tried to get us to identify with the group that has the lowest approval rating that isn't called the KKK. Am I right?
I think the only entity that has a lower public approval than Congress is probably the KKK. And I'm not even sure about that.
All right, well, let's get back to this groomer thing.
It feels as if Media Matters is making another gigantic persuasion mistake.
I think Media Matters, I saw a rumor, I need a fact check on this, but I think Media Matters was pushing the let's get rid of groomer as a social media word.
And then Twitter, Twitter originally was banning it, but then I think they reversed it.
So I like how Twitter handled this, actually.
I don't mind, and you might disagree with this, I don't mind when Twitter bans anything.
So now you can hate me and disagree with me for a second before I give you my reason.
I don't mind when Twitter bans anything.
I just want them to look at it.
Just give it a good look, and then make sure it's compatible with your rules.
And, you know, that's okay.
So I don't mind the banning.
I think we're good to go.
Yeah, sure. Sure.
I think that actually makes the service better, not worse.
Because a little bit of delay on a tweet, you know, 24 hours.
I don't know. That's fine.
So, I don't mind that.
But here's what I think they're doing by accident.
I believe by accident the people who are trying to remove groomer from the conversation have just added another G to LGBTQ. Right?
That's not what they're trying to do.
But they kind of made the case that the groomer thing is about LGBTQ. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not.
Right? I don't believe I've ever heard one conservative ever say, I don't like those LGBTQ people.
I've not heard that once.
I have heard them say, I don't care where your penis is.
It could be still connected to your body.
It could be in some petri dish somewhere for posterity.
We don't care where it is.
Just don't talk to our kids about sex.
Am I wrong? I feel like I'm characterizing the argument correctly.
We don't care where you put your penis, or where your vagina is, or if you have one.
We don't care what you identify with, what's in your brain.
We don't care. I'm saying we, but I'm not really talking about we.
I don't think the conservatives care.
Do they? They only care if it affects them.
And specifically... They're children.
And they're not even talking about the gay part.
Now, I do think that the flamboyant part becomes part of the story if you see an anecdote of that's who's sending the message forward.
So, yeah, I mean, there's certainly an overlap.
There's an overlap, but I would think there's a bigger overlap in just generic straight people pushing the same stuff, right?
Yeah. If every LGBTQ person was magically removed from the story, wouldn't you still have the same situation?
In other words, wouldn't there be plenty of straight white teachers who still want to give the same lesson, they just won't bring in the trans activists to help with the lesson?
It would be the same lesson, wouldn't it?
Now, there is a question of normalizing, normalizing the behavior.
Get over it.
Who cares? Everything gets normalized and unnormalized.
I mean, that's not the thing I'm worried about.
Yeah. So the real question is sex education in schools, and the people who say that is grooming...
I think it's accidental grooming, but it probably has that effect.
Meaning, I'm not sure that you can read the minds of all the people involved in all this, but I would agree that it's likely to have the effect of normalizing some lifestyles in the minds of children who then may be more confused instead of less confused.
Maybe. I don't know. I'm no expert on any of this.
I don't have any kids in that situation.
The only thing I'm going to add to the conversation is that I think that the people who are trying to protect the LGBTQ community, allegedly that's what they're trying to do, I think they may have moved in the other direction by somewhat confirming that they're lumping these groups together that the conservatives weren't exactly doing.
They may have been doing it unintentionally, but it wasn't exactly the point of it.
There are three groups or entities that Democrats trust to make major health decisions, including health care.
Number one is Joe Biden.
Democrats trust Joe Biden to make major decisions about health care and health outcomes.
The other is Congress, a Democrat Congress.
But I'd say Democrats trust a Democrat Congress with major health decisions.
So they trust Joe Biden with health decisions.
They trust Congress. And the third entity is little children, small children.
So that's the three groups that Democrats trust with their major health care decisions and for other people, not just their own.
And illegal aliens?
I don't know about that, but...
But yeah, they trust the children.
Well, I think the best political play that I've seen in a long time is the Republicans' shift to becoming the parent party.
And I don't know that they planned that.
I think it just happened that way.
Because you've got the grooming issue, you've got the school choice issue, you've got the abortion issue, and even the crime issue, social media damage issue, although that could cross parties.
It seems to me that that's just the best branding I've ever seen.
To the extent...
I believe any Republican could win by branding themselves pro-parent.
I just think that pro-parent just gets it all done.
There's nothing else to talk about.
If you brand yourself pro-parent and you have policies that suggest that that's real...
How do you lose?
How do you lose that election?
I don't know, but you can. I think you would just win every election after that point.
But you have to make the branding stick.
And I think their policies are...
Even if I don't agree with some of them, they're certainly consistent with being a pro-parent approach.
All right. Now that Republicans are seen better on education...
According to new polls, I think it's done.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention this, but I saw Jeff Giza, if I'm pronouncing it right, tweet in which he said that Trump's popularity among Republican voters, I guess mostly, his popularity was well below DeSantis in the beginning of the summer.
And then as the January 6th stuff went on, Trump just zoomed past...
This is only on predicted.
So this is people predicting the outcome.
So the people predicting, because of January 6th, predicted that Trump would win again instead of predicting the DeSantis.
So that's not proof that the January 6th things backfired.
But it's very consistent with my hypothesis that the January 6th thing was a complete backfire politically.
Yeah, the mole is back, right?
That's a callback.
All right, so Bannon got convicted of refusing to testify to Congress, even though he is going to testify.
And he'll appeal that, etc.
I guess it's punishable by 30 days to one year behind bars and a fine ranging from $100 to $100,000.
Now, Bannon seems to be confident that it will be reversed on appeal.
What do you think? Do you think it will be reversed on appeal?
I feel like it will.
Yeah. Like, 80% chance.
That's the odds I give it. I feel like it will.
And I don't know what arguments they're going to make, but it seems like some kind of equal protection thing is a slam dunk.
Because won't they be able to...
Dershowitz says it will be reversed on appeal.
Okay, I'm done. I've told you my Dershowitz rule, right?
The Dershowitz rule goes like this, that no matter what my opinion is on a legal question, once Dershowitz tells you his opinion, I just go, okay, forget about mine.
We'll just take his opinion.
Because his opinion is always going to be better than mine on anything related to law.
So if Dershowitz thinks it'll be reversed, it will.
I love the way Bannon is handling this.
Bannon is thanking the jury who found him guilty.
Thanking the courts and agreeing that they had the right verdict, which is interesting.
He was convicted.
He expects it to be overturned, but also thinks that the jury got it right.
Now that is good technique.
That's really good technique.
The bad technique would be to say the jury got it wrong and we'll reverse it on appeal.
Because the jury was only asked to look at the specific facts.
The jury is not an appeals court, right?
It can only look at, does the law say you had to say yes to testifying?
Did you say yes to testifying?
That's it. And that's all the jury does.
And so he quite accurately said, yeah, the jury thanked them for their time, thanked them for taking the day off, but it won't make any difference in the long run.
Their verdict has probably no impact on anything, because I'm sure he'll be...
Well, now that Dershowitz says it, I'm more confident that it'll be reversed.
But again, if you're...
Let me ask you this.
If you are a Republican...
Now, let me say this. If you're a Trump supporter, did the Bannon prosecution make you more or less a Trump supporter?
Probably more, right?
Because again, when you look at Steve Bannon, who do you see?
You see yourself.
If you were like-minded, and many of you are, and you supported Trump, for example, you see yourself.
That's who I see. When I look at Bannon, I see myself.
Because I talk about the same topics often in controversial ways.
Yeah, I absolutely see myself going to jail when I see Bannon get convicted.
So, no. I will vote for anybody who won't send me to jail.
And I think my best bet would be Trump.
Do you think that... Well, let me ask you this.
This is a serious question.
So you've seen the treatment of various notable pundit types.
If a Republican does not get elected again, do you think that I personally have any legal risk like actually going to jail?
What do you think? Some of you are saying yes.
A lot of no's.
A lot of no's. But a lot of yes's.
Here's the thing.
Democrats, if the Democrats are making me feel like I might go to jail, how am I going to act?
What is the right response to feeling there's a good chance you'll go to jail for not committing a crime?
Not committing a crime.
What would be my most normal reaction to that?
Full nuclear.
Full nuclear.
I've told you before, well, I don't know if I've told you lately, but there's an ethical problem with being a trained persuader.
And the ethical problem is much like being a professional boxer.
If you're a professional boxer, you don't want to get in a street fight because you might accidentally kill somebody because they're not trained like you are.
So that would be murder.
In the case of being a trained hypnotist, I do intentionally reduce my power for ethical reasons.
Like, I could...
I don't know if I want to say this out loud, but I've gone this far, so I will.
I could erase your free will if I wanted to.
I could erase your free will if I wanted to.
But I don't.
Because I would consider that deeply unethical.
But if you push me hard enough and you tell me I'm going to go to jail, what would I do if you said, well, you're going to go to jail unless you erase somebody's free will?
Well, now it's a different equation.
If I have to erase somebody's free will to stay in the jail...
I will. Now, free will's an illusion, right?
Free will's a myth. So I'd be erasing your illusion and substituting my opinion for whatever was going to happen.
But it would look like I was erasing your free will.
That's what it would feel like. So I'm just going to warn you that this whole January 6th stuff, the Bannon stuff, if they come after me, and I think there's a non-zero chance of that happening, I'm going to go full nuclear.
I'm going to take all the controls off.
And you've never seen that.
You've never seen that.
Maybe you don't want to.
But if I go nuclear, it's going to get dark.
It's going to get dark really fast.
And things will change.
So let's hope we don't see that.
Alright, someone needs to make a list of all the things you need to believe to be a Democrat lately.
I started the list, but here's just like a starter list.
In order to be a Democrat today, you would have to believe that Republicans love guns.
Oh my God, they love guns.
But they don't bring them to a coup.
They love guns, but they don't bring them to a coup.
Now, the Democrats will say, but Scott, there was a bunch of guns found.
People had guns in their truck, and so we had to cash it.
Oh, fuck you.
Fuck you. There was no guns.
There were some guns that were not brandished.
Republicans have guns in their trucks.
Republicans have guns nearby.
There were some bad people.
Who had stocks of guns that...
They're definitely sketchy.
But it wasn't about that, right?
It was literally a peaceful thing with some dangerous elements, like most protests.
Mostly good, but some bad elements.
If you are a Democrat, you have to believe that Trump knew he had lost the election, which is unknowable.
You have to believe that Trump...
Alone among all human mammals knows the unknowable, which is that the election was fair.
Now, we do know that there's no proof it was unfair, and therefore, you know, the system goes forward and should.
They should. I've always supported Biden being certified, just because I don't want to destroy the system, even if it got a bad result.
All right, so you'd have to believe that Trump knew the unknowable, that the election was totally fair, totally unknowable.
Might be true. You also have to believe that Trump was planning a coup without mentioning it to Don Jr.
or Ivanka. To me, that's the funniest one.
Have you ever tried saying that to...
Try this out. Try saying this to a Democrat who believes it was a planned, organized coup.
Just say, you know that the January 6th thing, they proved that Don Jr.
didn't know there was a coup planned?
Just don't let them change the subject for a moment, because they'll immediately change the subject.
Say, come back here for a moment.
I'm just wondering, is that your belief?
That there was a coup planned, but Trump didn't bring Don Jr.
into it. Or Ivanka.
Just watch their face.
And just see if they can keep anything that looks like a non-NPC face when they have to explain how Don Jr.
was not brought into the plot.
I mean, seriously.
Come on. Is that not the end of the conversation?
So, correct me if...
You lied. Correct me if we have...
The evidence is that Don Jr.
was trying to get Trump to call off the protests.
I mean, it's very clear that he wasn't in on anything.
So, do you know one reason that I'll never be put on a Democrat platform while this is going on?
Imagine me saying that in public on CNN. Imagine MSNBC making the mistake of inviting me on to talk about this.
And I'd just say, you know, I just got this one question.
How do you believe that Don Jr.
wasn't brought into the plot?
And then I would just laugh.
And they'd try to change the subject.
I'd be like, no, no, no. No, seriously.
And Don Lemon? Eh, I just gotta know.
Is that your belief? That Trump didn't bring Don Jr.
into his coup plot?
Really? Yeah. Really?
That's it. All right.
You'd also have to believe bail reform works.
You'd have to believe that Putin caused the inflation and some other stuff.
You'd also have to believe that Democrat-run cities are just as safe as anywhere else.
You'd have to believe that Biden doesn't have any mental capacity problems whatsoever.
He's fine. He's fine.
No problem here.
But I think there's a funnier list, if I spent more time on it, I think there's a funnier list of things you would have to believe to buy the narrative.
But Hunter? Hunter is the smartest...
Well, you know, I don't think that's been disproven.
So Joe Biden says that Hunter is the smartest person he knew.
Smart people can be addicted, right?
Smart people have addictions.
That happens all the time.
Because the addiction is bigger than the brain.
Like, your brain has no defense against addiction.
So, if you said he was addicted...
And if you said, let's say he had no ethical core, those have nothing to do with his intelligence.
He could be addicted.
He could be completely immoral.
But also the smartest person that Joe Biden knows.
Because you know what the smartest immoral addict would look like to me?
The smartest immoral addict would be someone who made millions of dollars from an enemy regime for doing next to nothing.
That's what the smartest, addicted, immoral person would look like to me.
It would look like somebody who had unlimited coke and sex and hookers and got away with it, lived a complete party life, made maybe tens of millions of dollars, and avoided all prosecution.
If selling influence is not nothing, Well, it is nothing if there's no influence.
Remember, people were buying the hope of influence.
They weren't buying actual influence.
You can't buy actual influence.
You can only buy access.
So access gives you the hope of influence.
It doesn't give you influence. It's still up to you.
Yeah. So I don't disagree that Hunter might be the smartest person he knows.
It's just that he's also an addict, which goes to the immoral part.
You can't be an addict and tell the truth.
Well, I suppose you could.
But it's rare. Once you say addict, lying is just built into the word.
Do you all know that? There's no such thing as an addict who tells the truth.
I don't know if they can.
I think it's just erased from their ability.
I'm not even making a judgment call.
That's not even like an insult.
If somebody's an addict, they're a liar.
It just comes with it.
You know, you could say, oh, I know an honest addict who tells you exactly what they do.
Oh, okay. No, they're lying about something else, probably.
Even the honest addict doesn't tell you exactly what they're taking.
Yeah. So, as soon as you say addict, you don't have to say anything else about the other stuff that comes with it.
It just comes along with it.
Let's see. Yeah.
Right. You know, I also, it makes me wonder if lying is a, maybe an indicator of a future addict.
You know, I wonder.
I know it doesn't work that way.
The causation is addiction first and then lying.
But I always question causality no matter how obvious it is.
It's obvious that the probable causation is that being an addict makes you a liar.
But I would not rule out that people who have trouble lying, like they just can't lie, would be less likely to become an addict.
Because at some point you know you have to lie to do it.
Like, you can't really get into it in the first place without lying about that first part.
No, I didn't try heroin.
No. I mean, you have to be working on getting addicted.
It doesn't happen on day one.
So I feel like you've got to be a liar at least by omission, or lie to yourself or something.
So I do wonder if being a liar, let's say a compulsive liar, you know, like a real liar, I wonder if that predicts that you'll become an addict.
I don't know. Somebody says that's absurd, and you could be right.
I don't know if it's absurd. It could be wrong.
I mean, it could be 100% wrong.
But I don't know if it's absurd.
I think absurd's too far.
Yeah. Now, by the way, this is a real good habit.
So my habit is, as soon as somebody tells me there's a correlation...
This causes this.
The very first thing I think is, well, maybe it's just a correlation, not a causation.
That's the first thing you should think.
Then the second thing you should think is, maybe it's reversed.
Maybe the causation is backwards.
Now, not always.
Not always. Can you have an oxytocin addiction?
Kind of. Kind of.
Yeah, if you don't get hugged or loved enough, you're going to have an oxytocin shortage, and I do think it makes you crazy.
Do you think that not being touched can give you mental illness?
What do you think? Yeah, I think so.
I think so. Yeah, I think that not being touched gives you mental illness.
Everybody says, it looks like it's a complete yes.
Yeah, it's just like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, sure.
Basically all of you.
How many of you are conscious, like right now, how many of you are conscious of not getting touched enough?
Like you know your oxytocin is low.
How many of you are low on oxytocin?
Yeah, most of you.
Now, some of that is who I attract to this live stream.
Now, I've noticed that many of you use this live stream exactly how I hoped.
And how I hoped is that I would feel like your friend.
Because I am. I'm on your side.
And I talk to you every day.
And even when I don't want to be here, I do it anyway.
I don't know if you know that.
I mean, there are days I wake up and I think, as much as I love doing this, and I do love doing it, unlike I genuinely like doing this.
That's why I'm right here. I mean, I've already gone long, probably.
It's 8 o'clock. I don't have to be doing this now.
But I like it. But there are days, there are days, especially when I was traveling and the time zone was different, where there were a few days I didn't want to do it.
But I did it for you.
Because I know that if your friend doesn't show up, it'll affect your day.
And I don't want to do that to you.
I would like you to have a good day.
So I'm your friend in the sense that literally every day I'm trying to help you have a good day.
Am I not? Now, of course, it's also a business model, and I monetize it, blah, blah, blah.
That helps me, encourages me to do it every day.
It's part of the process. But I feel like my primary motivation is that you like it.
If you didn't like it, I wouldn't monetize it, even if I could.
Someone on locals said they lost their dog and couldn't wait to hear your voice this morning.
Did somebody just lose their dog?
Because I have heard of people losing their dog, and...
Aw. I'm sorry.
I have a very old dog myself, and I know that my day is approaching.
Yeah. Yeah. You've seen me on days.
Well, you know, you probably know I had a tough pandemic.
We all had a tough pandemic.
But showing up here was part of my therapy, too.
Aw. Yeah, it was all part of my therapy as well.
So you help me as much as I help you.
So we're friends. And let's keep that up.
Yeah, you know, I've heard of people losing dogs and having more of a problem than losing people.
Like, actually, literally.
That's not a joke. You know, I have a friend of mine who years ago had a dog, had him for many years, and then never got a dog again.
And everybody asks, why don't you get another dog?
You so love that dog.
And he said, when I lost my dog, it felt like losing a limb.
And it never went away.
Yeah. So I didn't understand it until then.
And, you know, I have a dog, and I don't know what it's going to feel like when I don't.
But I don't like that part about feeling like I lost a limb.
So for all of you who have lost a dog...
By the way, I feel like cats are different.
I don't know. I mean, I feel plenty sad when I lose a cat, as I've lost several in my life.
But I feel like the dog is going to be different.
I really do. I don't know why.
Am I right? I feel like the dog is going to be a completely different feeling.
Anyway, I don't want to end on that.
So let me give you the positive spin on this.
Anybody who's in your life and it's positive, it's a gift.
Right? You wouldn't enjoy having anybody in your life if you couldn't lose them.
It's built in. You have to have the risk, not the risk, the guarantee of tragedy.
You have to have the guarantee of tragedy to make your life have any value at all.
So, don't hate it, accept it.
It's sort of the Buddhist way.
I mean, I'm bastardizing it.
But the Buddhist way is you don't try to avoid pain like all pain, because life is suffering.
You have to learn to enjoy the suffering.
And that sounds ridiculous the first time you hear it, doesn't it?
Doesn't that sound like absurd?
You have to learn to enjoy the pain?
That doesn't sound like something you could do.
And you can. You can.
It's actually doable.
In some areas, I've managed to do it, and when you do it, like just in an area, I can't do it all the time for my whole life, but there are some times when you say, well, let me give you an example.
When I lost my stepson to fentanyl a few years ago, I wanted the pain to go away, You know, the pain of the loss.
But I also didn't.
I didn't. Because if the pain went away, then the meaning would go away.
And I didn't want to lose the meaning.
So the meaning was more valuable to me than the pain.
And so when I started to realize that the pain and the meaning were inseparable, I merged them.
I merged them.
And now I take the pain of the loss...
With the meaning. And there's just one thing now.
So when I see my stepson, because you see him everywhere, it's not like a tragedy feeling.
It's more like positive.
Well, anyway. On that note, YouTube, I will talk to you tomorrow.
