Episode 1285 Scott Adams： Trump Wins the Impeachment Doubleheader While the Press Hides Stories
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
139.44208
Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, we talk about the coronavirus pandemic, CRISPR-Cas9, and whether or not we could modify a virus to make it more deadly. Plus, Scott talks about Valentine's Day.
Transcript
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Hey. Hey, everybody. Hey, Jack. Good to see you. Come on in. Come on in. It's an incredible
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day. One of the best, really. And today on Coffee with Scott Adams, we're going to have
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a good time, even if you're listening to this at 1.5 times speed. Well, you'll just get
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the goodness a little bit faster that way, won't you? But you're only going to get that
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in replay, I'm afraid. I can't talk that fast in real time. But before we begin, what would
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make this extra special? I think you know. It's a simultaneous sip, and all you need
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is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of
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any kind. Oh, this is a problem. I can't reach my coffee cup because my microphone isn't long
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enough. This is a problem. All right. You're going to have to come with me. YouTube, stay
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where you are. Periscope, come with me. Come with me. Oh, yeah. There we go. That's the
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good stuff. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the
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thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.
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Ah. Oh, I can't put my cup back. All right. I'm going to have to fix this. Hold on. Hold
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on. There we go. All better. All right. Let's talk about all the things. First of all, happy
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Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day. My denture's working. I don't have dentures. Just kidding.
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Happy Valentine. Why can't I say that word? Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. Special
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shout out to my incredible wife, Christina. Happy Valentine's Day to you if you're watching.
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And I hope you're up early so you can. So the U.S. is reporting the lowest number of weekly
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COVID cases since October. All right. All right. Is the vaccine working? Maybe. Because I would
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think we would have the highest infections now, right? Right in the middle of February.
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February. Wouldn't February be one of your bad virus months automatically? Well, let's keep
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that going. So that's some good news. You know, you've been hearing about this allegation that
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the COVID virus, coronavirus, came from a lab in Wuhan. We do not have proof of that. That
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is an allegation. But one of the things you're hearing about is whether or not the so-called
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gain of function could be detected. In other words, if somebody had tried to take regular natural
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viruses, and if someone, let's say a major military power with a biological lab, if they tried to
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weaponize that by tweaking it to make it extra deadly or to have some special gain of function
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to make it more of a weapon, would we be able to spot that by looking at the virus? In other words,
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could you look at the virus and say, well, look, yeah, there's a little man-made thing in there,
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that virus. And when this first, when the pandemic first came out, and people were, I heard experts
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say on television, the experts said, no, you know, we looked at it and you could tell, I mean, you could
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tell if it were modified and it's just a regular virus, blah, blah, blah. To which I said to myself,
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can you? Can you tell? Because it seemed to me that there would be at least two ways that you
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could modify a virus. And this is without knowing anything, right? My complete zero knowledge of
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science is going to be fully applied here. One way, it seems to me, would be directly. If you could
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literally directly somehow add a, add a thing or subtract a thing from a virus, I don't know. Can
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we do that? Is there some lab that can add or subtract something from a virus? Is that even a
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thing? I don't know. If you could, I suppose if that existed, maybe you could detect it. You'd say,
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ah, that can't happen naturally. That must have been some human did that. But the second way
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that you can create gain of function, somebody says a CRISPR can. So you can change the DNA in
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a virus? Is it DNA? I don't even know what a virus isn't even alive, right? The virus is technically
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not alive. So I don't know exactly what kind of stuff is inside a virus. We're well beyond my
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scientific knowledge. Somebody says genes. I don't know if that's right either. So let me not try to
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guess on the science. I'm going to make my major point, which is there must be at least two ways
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you can modify them. One would be directly, if we can do that. But the other way would be to just
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breed it naturally. How can you breed a virus? Well, apparently the way you do it is you put one
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animal who has the virus. Let's say a penguin or whatever, pangolin or whatever those things are.
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You put it somewhere where it can infect another animal. Let's say a different kind of mammal or
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bird or a pig. And then maybe the pig infects yet another animal. So I need a fact check on this,
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but my understanding is that if you create these artificial infection scenarios where the virus
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will jump from, and this is the key, one species to another, that during the jump from species,
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the virus changes. Some of those changes will be nothing. Some will make it less deadly. Some might
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make it more deadly. So you could experiment just by reinfecting different types of animals
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animals until you ended up with a virus that had some extra good stuff just by accident that you
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wanted. And that would be a gain of function. Now let me ask you this. If scientists looked at a virus
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that had gone through, hypothetically, the transition from multiple species to give it a gain of function,
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could you identify that? I mean, really? Do we have any science that could identify that a human
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put these animals together as opposed to there was something in the wild in which they just got
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infected? I don't think so. Somebody says probabilistically. Maybe. Maybe. But I don't think you could be
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sure. Right? So I'll just put that out there. And by the way, the first person I asked this
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question to privately, just without, you know, something I didn't do on Twitter or didn't do
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publicly, but just privately, I asked the smartest person I knew in this kind of area, could you put a
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gain of function on there that nobody could detect? What did the smartest people say? Yeah, obviously you
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could. Of course you could. Yeah. Now I don't know if they're right, but I'm telling you the smartest
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people I know say, yeah, obviously you could do that. So maybe, maybe not. The Daily Mail is reporting
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today something that I just had to keep reading and rereading to see if it, I didn't even think I was
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really reading it. All right. Tell me if you've heard this. So the Daily Mail is reporting this like
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it's just a fact. Is this a fact? Here's what they report. The Pentagon admits, admits being the key
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word here, Pentagon admits that it has been testing wreckage from UFO crashes, including a possible
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quote, memory metal that experts claim may have been recovered during the 1947 Roswell crash.
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What? They're reporting this like it's a fact. Now, they're not quite saying that it's an alien spaceship
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piece of metal. They're not quite saying that. But they are saying we found some metal that doesn't appear
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to come from human beings. And they're calling this, they're reporting it like it's a fact. Somebody says, yes,
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it's called nitinol. Now, is this story real? Right. So when they say UFOs, they just mean
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unidentified. So it could have been an unidentified, let's say, Russian technology that we don't
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recognize. So it's just unidentified. They don't say it's from outer space. But they do kind of say
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it's a metal we don't make here on Earth. And it wasn't something that came off an asteroid.
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It was something that somebody made. And it doesn't look like it came from Earth.
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What do you think? What do you think about this story? I am going to call bullshit on this story.
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I do not believe that there are that there is life on other planets, because I think we're a
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simulation. And it was just never built out because we didn't need it. So there's just no
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reason for life to be on other planets, because we're a simulation. And if we can't get to those
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other planets easily, well, we just didn't need to put anything there. So I don't believe it. But
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it's a fun story. It's a fun story. And so therefore, I like it, because it's fun. So here's
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my take on the illegitimate press that we have in this country. You're seeing a lot of the anti-Trumpers
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use a phrase called the big lie. So they're using this label, the big lie, to talk about Trump's claim
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that the election had been fraudulent. Now, you may be familiar that the phrase big lie comes from
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Nazi propaganda. And the idea is that the Nazis said, if you tell a small lie, you know, such as
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somebody stole some loaf of bread or something, people are inclined, you know, maybe believe it,
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maybe not. But if you tell a lie that's so big, if it's big enough, people will believe it because
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they will say to themselves, well, nobody could tell a lie that big. You know, like if you heard
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tomorrow that an actual alien spaceship landed in the middle of the Capitol, and all of the news
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reported it was true, that's so big, that's probably true. Right? Your brain just says that can't be not
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true. How could that be not true? Everybody is reporting it. How could that not be true? Right?
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So if the lie is big enough, it makes it look more credible. And that is literally a Nazi
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propaganda trick. That's where we get the phrase the big lie. Now, when your press in the United States
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refers to Trump and by extension his followers, as spreading the quote, big lie, what is that doing
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to public discourse? Well, number one, it conflates Trump supporters by association with Trump. And
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many of them agreed with him on this point. It equates them to Nazis. That's what it does. The reason
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they choose that is to equate Trump and his followers with Nazis. Fuck you. Let me say this to any press
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person who uses the phrase the big lie, and tries to paint Trump supporters as Nazis, just in this clever
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little way. It's racist. It's racist. I regard that like the n-word, but used against me. Right? To me, that is
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as offensive. That's as offensive as the n-word is to anybody else. Now, can I compare
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offensiveness? No. I mean, it's subjective. But it's a 10. You know, I would say that if you said
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to any black American, how bad is the use of the n-word if it's, you know, if you're not black when
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you're using it, how bad is that? I think they say that's a 10 out of 10. I would agree. That's a 10
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out of 10, my personal opinion. You can't get any worse than using the n-word, you know, if you're not
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black. Likewise, this is a 10 out of fucking 10. When you're using literally Nazi imagery to paint
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your enemies just because they weren't sure that the election had transparency, that's fucking
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racism. That's a 10 out of fucking 10. And if you, if you use it, as I just read in the Washington
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Post, somebody using that, that phrase, you're a fucking racist. You're a fucking racist. Live
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with it. You fucking racist. Now you might be a white person being racist against other white
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people, but it's still the same fucking thing. You're a fucking racist. Right? And I believe
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that my anger about that phrase is going to keep increasing until people understand this
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is unacceptable behavior. Now there is a second problem with using this big lie. Do you know
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what it is? From a persuasion propaganda perspective. Anybody? Anybody? Tell me what is the propaganda
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of brainwashing quality of using the phrase? The big lie. In the comments, you're going to have it
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in a moment. It's making you think past the sale. When they say it's the big lie, they try to make
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you uncritically accept that it's a lie. We haven't determined that. It has not been determined that it's
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a lie. It is simply something that the people who don't believe it think is probably not true. It's
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not the big fucking lie. It's the big fucking probably not true according to you. That's what
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it is. It's probably not true according to you. If you're people using the big lie phrase. It's not a
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lie. That would indicate that we know it's not true. We simply know it hasn't been proven that
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there is any widespread fraud in the court of law. That's what we know. We don't know it's a big
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fucking lie. And when you tell us it's a big fucking lie, that's a big fucking lie. That's the big lie.
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Now remember I keep telling you, I hate it, I hate it when Tucker Carlson keeps being right about this.
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He just keeps being right. That whatever they're doing, whatever they're doing themselves, they'll
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accuse you of. And I swear to God I don't want that to be true. Because I just don't know why it's true.
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Like I can't figure out why. Why does this keep being true? But this is exactly what they're doing
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with this big lie thing. The big lie is to make it look like the thing they're doing, they're doing.
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Which is lying about the credibility of the election. We don't know it was honest. We don't
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know that it wasn't honest. We simply don't fucking know. And nobody's fixing it. Nobody's fucking
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fixing it. There is no effort by anybody that I'm aware of, fact check me on this, to fix the
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fucking system. Because it's going to be just as non-transparent next time. So here again the
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illegitimate press is accusing the right of their own crime. Spreading the big lie.
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Somebody asked me if this phrase, the big lie, is so good persuasively that maybe it came
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from Cialdini, Robert Cialdini. Now if you know my history, I've talked about him as possibly
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being, or probably, being an advisor to the Clinton campaign. There's no indication that
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he was involved with the Biden campaign. I don't know one way or the other. But somebody
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asked me, do you think he was behind this phrase, the big lie? I'm going to give you
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just an opinion. No. And here's why I don't think he was behind the big lie. Because it's
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a racist, fucking, brainwashing, piece of shit thing to do. And I have no reason to believe
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that Robert Cialdini is a fucking piece of shit. No indication of that. In fact, I believe
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he's actually taught courses on ethically using persuasion. He would be exactly the
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opposite of somebody who would give you advice to compare people to fucking Nazis. He didn't
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do that. Now, I suppose anything's possible, right? I could be wrong. I'm only just speculating.
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But it's kind of fucking crazy to imagine that a normal person would do this. This isn't what
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normal people who are good people do. And as far as I know, Cialdini is a normal, good
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person. This is fucking evil. I have no reason to think he's fucking evil. I think he just
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likes Democrats more than Republicans. Fine. No problem with that.
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All right. Different topic. Jonathan Haidt. H-A-I-D-T. If I'm Haidt. Haidt. How do you pronounce
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his last name? A well-known author. He tweeted around a study that says that kids who get help
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from adults to solve a puzzle become helpless on the next puzzle. And you can see it in real
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time. It happens instantly. So if you have a puzzle and kids are trying to solve it, you have half of
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the kids just work as long as they can without any help. And then another half, you have a parent jump
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in and say, ah, here's the solution and solve it for them. Then you wait a little bit and you give
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those same two groups of people a new challenge, a new puzzle. The ones who had no help charge right
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through and do the same thing they did on the first one. They try as hard as they can to solve it
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and succeed to some extent. The ones who got help can't solve the second one because they can't try
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hard enough. They've been ruined, actually broken by giving them too much help. Now, I have often said
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this about my own parenting experience. My parents were maybe typical of the time, I'm not sure, but they
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were fairly hands-off, I would say. I don't know if my siblings are watching this, but I would look for
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a second opinion on this. My belief or memory of my childhood is that we had almost unprecedented
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ability to make our own decisions about stuff and to manage our own day. I don't believe, listen to
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this and then compare this to 2021. If you have kids in school right now, just hear this story and just
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try to imagine this today. My parents didn't really show an interest in my schoolwork at all. Now, they told me
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they expected me to get A's and they expected me to go to college. And it was just an expectation which they
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drilled, my mother especially, drilled into us from birth. You're going to college, you're getting A's. But how I did that
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was entirely up to me. Not once did my mother or father offer to help on my homework. I don't remember
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even asking. And yeah, I'm seeing in the comments, same here, same here. So when I graduated college,
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just try to imagine this experience in 2021. So I graduated college with a little bit of money I got
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from graduation and some I'd saved up. I had about $2,000, I guess, in savings from mowing lawns plus
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graduation gifts. And I took two suitcases and the one suit I owned, I think I got from Sears.
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I bought a suit from Sears. And I wore my suit on an airplane, took my two pieces of luggage and moved
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to California. And with no plan, figured it out. That's it. I actually flew across the country
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to spend the rest of my life without a plan. The plan was to sleep on my brother's couch
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and look for a job, if you can call that a plan. Second part of the plan was to find the first job
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I could get at the best company in the field that I wanted, which was finance. I was an economics
00:23:06.280
major. So I took a job as a bank teller for the fastest moving technologically superior company
00:23:18.000
called Crocker Bank. Later, they were bought by Wells Fargo. So I took the worst job I could at the best
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company. I signed up for every training course they can. Later, in later years, I got my MBA at
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night. And I basically built a talent stack that gave me a lot of options that got me all the way
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to here. Now, I had zero help from my parents on the details. I had 100% help from my parents on the
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mission. And the mission was always the same. You're going to do well in school. You're going to go to
00:23:55.960
college. You're going to be rich. Now, I'd have to ask my siblings if they were also told they were
00:24:03.200
going to be rich. But my parents told me that. And sure enough, I had an expectation. I had all the
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support I needed. I didn't need anymore. I didn't want anymore. And I'm pretty sure that the fact I had
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to figure out so much on my own is like a superpower. I never encounter a situation where
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I don't know what to do. I mean, that's an exaggeration. I'm sure I do. But I go through
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my life thinking I can conquer just about anything because that's my experience. Nobody jumped in to
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save me. So I either failed. You know, I either sank or swam. And so far, I'm swimming. So I believe we
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may be destroying an entire generation by being helpful. We might be destroying them by being
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helpful. It's scary. This Governor Cuomo story and the nursing homes deaths is just getting worse.
00:25:09.480
Oh, my God. You know, I've been telling you that as a standard of behavior, I didn't want to be the
00:25:19.260
one who was tough on any of our leaders if they got anything wrong during the coronavirus. And I've
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been applying that to Cuomo, trying to be consistent and saying, yes, it's true that very bad things
00:25:31.160
happened. But I feel like we would need to know the details of exactly what caused him to sign off on
00:25:38.340
the decision to send 9,000 infected people back into the worst place they could be sent.
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I feel as if... It seems to me that I saw him saying in an interview that he was following federal
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guidelines at the time. Can somebody confirm that? Is that his actual explanation that they
00:25:58.200
were the federal guidelines and he just followed them? Give me a fact check on that. Anyway,
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the news I follow tends to consistently leave out whatever it is that Cuomo says as his response
00:26:13.300
to why all these people died. I'm looking in the comments. Yes, I'm saying yes. Now, if you watch
00:26:20.260
Fox News, they'll just never mention that. They will just never mention that according to Cuomo,
00:26:26.620
and I'm not saying it's true, I'm just saying according to Cuomo, that he has a pretty good
00:26:31.020
explanation. On paper, whether you buy it or not, but on paper, that's a pretty good explanation.
00:26:39.860
Now, somebody says he had a hospital ship and he had the Javits Center. That's true. But I put myself
00:26:46.220
in his situation and I ask you this. Would you have sent infected people to those assets if you thought
00:26:54.560
you didn't need to use them and you might be able to close them down and save a ton of money later?
00:27:00.920
Now, it might be the federal government's money, but still, who wants to waste a bunch of money?
00:27:05.460
So, I put myself in this situation and I tell you this. I'm not positive I would have acted differently
00:27:13.120
than Cuomo in that situation. Are you? Be honest. Are you positive that if you were in that situation,
00:27:22.720
you would have acted differently? I'm not. I'm not positive of that, which is why I've been soft
00:27:30.560
on this topic. Because if you put me in that situation and I'm making a decision a minute
00:27:36.920
because it's the pandemic, plus I'm still the governor, right? I've got a whole pandemic
00:27:41.340
on top of my job, which is a full-time job. A million decisions, somebody comes and says,
00:27:48.460
what do we do with the seniors? The federal guideline says, send them back to the nursing home.
00:27:54.340
Just make sure that they're separated or whatever. So, you're making a million decisions.
00:28:00.360
The federal government tells you what to do in this exact situation. And you know that they've
00:28:06.560
looked into it. You're not supposed to be the expert. You're not the CDC. So, the federal government
00:28:12.500
says, send them back. And you're making a million decisions. And you go, yeah, here, send them
00:28:17.660
back. And then you go on to your other million decisions.
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If you can tell me that you say you would not have done the same thing Cuomo did, and I don't
00:28:31.100
know if I'm describing it correctly, right? So, I'm seeing a little pushback. I might not
00:28:35.060
be describing the situation correctly. But my point is, if you weren't there, if you weren't
00:28:41.340
there, I don't think you know what happened. And that's why I'm still putting a little bit
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of reservation on a complete blame of Cuomo for a bad decision that killed thousands of
00:28:54.500
people who didn't need to die. But the story got way worse. Way worse.
00:29:03.500
I reached the limit of where I can give somebody the benefit of a doubt. Yeah, I see it in the
00:29:11.140
comments. Apparently, his staff, and he must have known about it, lied to cover up the number
00:29:18.460
of deaths. And they lied because it would look bad if they said the real number. And they've
00:29:26.280
admitted that. That's now in fact that they lied about the number because they didn't want
00:29:33.200
to look so bad. That's grounds for removal from office, right? There is nothing I can say
00:29:43.660
to soften that, right? I mean, I've been pretty, pretty generous, wouldn't you say? I'm trying
00:29:52.320
to apply the same standard that I applied to Trump and any other leader, trying to apply
00:29:57.620
the same standard to Cuomo, trying to be fair. But when I heard that they lied about the number
00:30:03.540
of deaths, and it looks reliably like that's true. You always have to be careful. We're still
00:30:09.080
in the fog of war. It's a new story. Might not be true, but it looks true. That's unforgivable.
00:30:17.360
That's a crime, isn't it? I mean, I think it's a crime. That's unforgivable. So if it turns
00:30:23.620
out that the facts are correct, I don't think Cuomo can remain in office. I just don't see
00:30:30.700
how that's possible. I mean, he might remain in office, but I don't see how that could make
00:30:35.360
sense for the public. All right, here's an observation which I make a lot, and every time
00:30:41.560
I do, there's some new evidence to support it. And it goes like this. Democrats think in
00:30:49.520
terms of goals. A goal, for example, would be everybody is out of poverty. Pretty good,
00:30:58.540
right? That'd be a good goal, get everybody out of poverty. Another goal would be something
00:31:02.820
for the environment and climate change, etc. So the Democrats are good on goals. In fact,
00:31:11.600
I like a lot of their goals, because they're social good kinds of goals. Everybody treated
00:31:17.760
nice. Everybody's got equal opportunities. Those are good goals. Very good goals. Republicans
00:31:25.680
have a slightly different take on things, and this is just an observation. It doesn't mean
00:31:31.140
everyone, right? It's sort of a general observation. And Republicans tend to be systems-oriented.
00:31:39.420
That is to say, we don't know what the final outcome will be, and we don't know how long it
00:31:44.220
will take to get there, and we don't even know if we can get there. We'd like a world
00:31:49.200
where there's nobody in poverty, but we can't make that a goal. But we can make a system that
00:31:55.160
does the best job of getting us there. And if you design your systems right, let's say
00:32:00.000
your capitalism systems and your democratic systems, your government systems, your legal system,
00:32:07.740
if you get all those systems working right, then the goals take care of themselves as
00:32:13.440
much as can be, right? You maybe can't get to the ultimate end point, but it's the best
00:32:19.040
you can do. Now look at Mitch McConnell's statement many of you saw, in which he talked about the
00:32:26.680
impeachment outcome in which the president was acquitted. Mitch McConnell voted to acquit.
00:32:32.220
The reason was systemic. McConnell said, I don't think that the Senate has jurisdiction over
00:32:43.040
someone who's not in politics anymore. Now, the Democrats would say, wait a minute, we've
00:32:50.720
got this precedent. We've got this legal precedent. We've got this history where we've got this
00:32:57.540
case where you really can do that. But here's the thing. Suppose you really could do that.
00:33:04.020
Let's say the Democrats were right. Let's say the law was on their side. Let's say they could
00:33:10.000
impeach somebody who's out of office. Should they? Should they? Is that a system that you would want
00:33:20.000
going forward? Do you want that to be your system that applies forever?
00:33:28.680
I very much agreed with Mitch McConnell. Now, he may have been inconsistent with case law,
00:33:35.480
but he's not inconsistent with what makes a good system. And a good system is, why the fuck does
00:33:43.780
the Senate have any control over a private citizen after they're out of office? Now, obviously, in the
00:33:50.940
sense of making laws, that's their job. But in terms of impeachment, what the fuck do you have to do with
00:33:57.580
that? I don't care what the case law is. Doesn't matter what the case law is. It's obvious that's a bad
00:34:05.420
system to punish somebody after they're out of office. Now, as McConnell says, and others say,
00:34:12.540
we do have a legal system. If Trump did something that the legal system needs to deal with, there's
00:34:18.300
no restriction on that. Right? But Mitch McConnell, I completely back his decision exactly the way he
00:34:26.680
did it. I like the entire thing he did. Now, he was very hard on Trump for his responsibility for the
00:34:36.100
Capitol attack. Do you feel the same as McConnell does about the Capitol attack? Do you feel like McConnell was
00:34:45.240
maybe a little too hard on the president? I don't care. I don't care at all. Here's why. We have this dumb fuck
00:34:56.460
system where the victims of the crime, in this case, the politicians who are actually at the Capitol, they're the
00:35:04.020
victims of the crime. They're the ones with PTSD. They're the ones who are being hunted. They're the
00:35:09.860
ones who are afraid for their lives. McConnell is a fucking victim of the crime that he was on the jury
00:35:16.740
to judge. What kind of a fucking system puts the victim or the victim's family on the fucking jury?
00:35:26.680
What kind of a system is that? If you put the victim on the fucking jury? Don't expect them to say nice
00:35:36.200
things about the perpetrator of the crime. Mitch McConnell should have gone. I won't use the word
00:35:43.920
should. I hate that word. It seems entirely appropriate to me that the victim of the crime
00:35:50.900
is a little bit pissed off. Put yourself in Mitch McConnell's place. You are in the Capitol and you
00:35:59.720
don't think your president did enough to save your fucking life. I probably would have voted to impeach.
00:36:08.260
Just leave that hanging there. If I had been in the Senate and I or even just my colleagues
00:36:18.040
had been in the Capitol building and I didn't think the president did enough to stop it, I wouldn't even
00:36:25.260
care what the charges were. I wouldn't even care what the impeachment articles were. I wouldn't even
00:36:33.040
care about any of it. I would fucking vote to impeach that guy if I were the victim. Now, I'm not the
00:36:40.240
victim, so I get, you know, I get the advantage of, you know, being outside the system a little bit.
00:36:46.320
So I've got a little bit more objectivity. But in my opinion, anybody who was in the building,
00:36:54.560
Ted Cruz, anybody else, could have voted to impeach. I would have done it just as a victim.
00:37:03.040
Forget my responsibility to the public. I wouldn't even care. So maybe you shouldn't
00:37:10.940
make me a senator. Because I would have ignored the law. I would have ignored the facts. Except
00:37:17.080
the one fact that I didn't think the president did enough to save my fucking life. I'd care about
00:37:22.880
that. And I wouldn't care about one fucking thing else. So I back Mitch McConnell's take on this 100%.
00:37:30.040
And I actually respect him for using a technical argument that I agree with, that the Senate
00:37:39.800
should not have jurisdiction, even though maybe technically they do. So a standing ovation for
00:37:48.180
Mitch McConnell for the way he handled this as a victim. As a victim. Right? If that's the system,
00:37:56.360
putting victims on the jury, this is what you're going to get. So good for him. All right.
00:38:14.360
I'm going to always say that Trump was acquitted of two impeachments and therefore was essentially
00:38:21.700
not impeached. Now I know that impeachment is sort of like just a stain that's supposed to be on the
00:38:30.100
record. It's not exactly like indicting somebody. But you know, in the criminal system, if you indict
00:38:36.500
somebody for a crime, and then they go to trial, and the jury finds them not guilty, what do we say to that
00:38:45.460
person? Do we say, well, there was an indicted person? No, we don't talk of it that way, because
00:38:50.740
that wouldn't be fair. We talk about it as, as a person who's been found not guilty. That's how we
00:38:58.880
talk about it. But if you get impeached, which is a little bit like indictment, and then you get acquitted,
00:39:05.680
we still say you were impeached. Is that fair? It seems to me, if the impeachment doesn't go all
00:39:14.320
the way to the point of impeachment, the point is removal from office. If it doesn't go to that
00:39:19.920
point, can you say an impeachment succeeded? I would say it's two failed impeachments.
00:39:27.560
You can say they were impeachments, but they were failed impeachments. It was two attempts to
00:39:36.820
impeach them that failed. And then people can say, but there was an impeachment. And then you can say,
00:39:44.200
yes, there totally was. There was a failed impeachment. There was an unsuccessful one.
00:39:49.980
And then they'll say, no, no, it was successful, because the impeachment part is separate from the
00:39:54.560
trial part, to which you say, what's the point of the first part? Well, what's the purpose of the
00:40:01.840
first part without the second part? Would you even do that? Because it's just a censure. If it doesn't
00:40:10.180
go to removing from office, it's just a censure. It's not really an impeachment. So just to be
00:40:17.120
annoying to Democrats, because I know they'll hate it, I'm going to say that there were two impeachment
00:40:21.200
attempts, but neither of them succeeded. Trump wins the doubleheader. I saw a tweet from Don
00:40:29.080
Jr. this morning talking about what a bad week the Democrats have had. Everything from the impeachment
00:40:36.260
results to the self-immolation of the Lincoln Project to Governor Cuomo's problems. It's a really
00:40:48.260
bad week. And that's not even counting what Biden has done or not done. So here's the weirdest dumb
00:41:00.900
story. Somebody named T.J. Ducklow. It's spelled just like a duck, and then with an L-O on the end.
00:41:10.660
So he was Biden's deputy press secretary, and I guess Politico was going to do an article about him.
00:41:20.220
No, somebody was going to do an article about him, about a relationship he had with some other
00:41:25.320
reporter. Axios was going to do an article about Ducklow's alleged relationship with a reporter for
00:41:33.560
Politico. Now, is that a fair story? Yes. It is fair to report that somebody is in a romantic
00:41:41.880
situation if one is a reporter and one works for the press corps. That's fair, right? Or one works for
00:41:50.880
the White House press corps, or not the White House communications group. So it's perfectly fair
00:41:59.700
that they were going to do the story. Now, what's reported is that T.J. Ducklow threatened the
00:42:07.560
reporter when he found out she was going to do the story, and his threat was that he would destroy her.
00:42:15.060
And he was, at first they were going to give him a week off without pay or something,
00:42:19.800
but then he quit, which means basically he got fired. So I'm going to throw you a,
00:42:27.400
going to throw you a curve here, and I'm going to defend T.J. Ducklow. Bet you didn't see that
00:42:36.880
coming. And here's my defense. The phrase, I'm going to destroy you, is number one, typical political
00:42:47.600
speech. It's not typical where you work, but it's typical political speech. That thing is
00:42:57.400
threat is probably the most common threat that anybody's ever used. And it's better. Here's the
00:43:04.560
second part. Totally justified and legal. Legal and justified. Just as the reporter doing a story
00:43:15.920
about this, which would end up, you know, ruining this guy's career, etc. Totally justified.
00:43:20.600
The reporter is completely within her rights to do the story. And it's a legitimate story.
00:43:28.040
Completely within her rights to do the story. But Ducklow is completely within his rights to destroy
00:43:35.540
her life. I mean, meaning her career. When he says, I'll destroy you, that should be interpreted as
00:43:41.500
career-wise. It should not be interpreted the dumb way, which is some kind of violence or anything like
00:43:48.060
that. I feel like that. I feel like that's fair. And, you know, it seems worse because one's male and
00:43:57.000
one's female. So it takes on that extra dimension. But telling people that you'll destroy them if they
00:44:04.400
destroy you, if it's all legal, everybody's acting legally. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like this is
00:44:16.840
kind of normal behavior. It became a story. So, you know, Biden had to deal with it. He probably did the right
00:44:23.460
thing. But I'm not sure this was so bad. I'm looking at your comments. Somebody says, I'm okay with this.
00:44:35.460
You can defend that, but it was Joe's promise to not tolerate bad behavior. Joe kept his promise.
00:44:41.180
Joe kept his promise. Because he's gone now. I'm going to give Joe a pass on that. Now, it looked
00:44:48.000
like he was going to get a week off, but as soon as there was some pushback from the public,
00:44:52.420
probably that's when Biden got involved. My guess is that Biden really wasn't involved in a lower
00:44:59.300
level decision like that. But I think he probably said, when somebody said, hey, Biden, you said you'd
00:45:04.820
get rid of people who acted this way. I think he kept his promise and got rid of them. You know,
00:45:10.740
now it's reported that he resigned, but I imagine it's the same thing. All right. So you don't have
00:45:17.600
to agree with me on that, but that's my take. Biden said he, in talking about the impeachment,
00:45:28.260
Biden said that he denounced violence and extremism and said Americans have a duty to defend the truth
00:45:35.140
and defeat the lies. This is the man who ran and based his campaign on the fine people hoax,
00:45:41.980
which was debunked in front of the entire world, in front of Congress, on every network. The biggest
00:45:49.640
lie ever told, the most damaging one by far. And he's coming out in favor of truth and defeating the lies.
00:46:00.440
Now, his entire campaign was built on a lie that has just been debunked.
00:46:07.780
But will the press call him on that? They will not. Here's a question for you. The biggest complaint
00:46:16.680
about Trump was that he had to know his words would cause the kind of violence that we saw at the Capitol.
00:46:24.280
That Trump had to know it. Because common sense says if you keep talking about the election being stolen
00:46:32.240
and then you talk the way you talked, that any reasonable person in that situation would have known
00:46:39.280
that those words would lead to violence. But here's the question. Why didn't the security
00:46:46.500
people know that? The people who were in charge of security for the Capitol? Why didn't they know
00:46:52.460
that? Because they didn't have enough security? If Trump was supposed to know that, but all the
00:46:59.400
people who listened to him talk didn't know it, why wouldn't they know it? What about the press?
00:47:06.700
The press is pretty clear when they say that anybody should have known that these words would lead to
00:47:13.080
violence. Was the press telling you that the Capitol was going to be attacked yesterday, before it
00:47:18.060
happened? Did the press warn you? Did the press say, hey, why isn't there enough security? We can all see
00:47:27.500
that this will lead to violence. Did they? I don't think they did. So what you're seeing here is a
00:47:35.460
hindsight persuasion. They're trying to make you believe that what is obvious today was also obvious
00:47:45.220
before the Capitol attack. Now, I watch a lot of politics and I listen to most of what the president
00:47:52.540
says. I had no idea that the Capitol would actually be penetrated. No idea. Did you? How many
00:48:05.360
of you listening to everything that Trump said, watching the news, how many of you knew that the
00:48:12.880
Capitol would be breached? I kind of assumed that they would have security, right? Now, I knew that
00:48:22.660
there would be protests no matter which way things went. Protests were guaranteed. But I also thought
00:48:30.500
that the protests in cities would look just the way they always do. Too many things get destroyed.
00:48:36.640
But I figured that any kind of protest in the Capitol would not penetrate the actual Capitol.
00:48:45.880
How many of you, with all of your common sense and judgment and watching the news, how many of you
00:48:53.580
knew that the Capitol was going to be attacked? Right? Fucking zero. We didn't know that. You know,
00:49:02.580
you can make the same argument about a million different statements by a million different
00:49:08.820
politicians. Sometimes people say things and then sometime after that, a bad thing will happen
00:49:14.860
related to the thing they said. Does that mean they caused it? I think it's just sometimes bad things
00:49:21.960
happen. And sometimes people were talking about them before they happened. That's probably all that's
00:49:27.500
going on here. All right. So that's another thing that the press, which is completely illegitimate,
00:49:36.640
as you know, both the left and the right at this point, they don't tell you what I just told you,
00:49:43.680
which is that fucking nobody knew it was going to happen. And they imagine that Trump is suddenly
00:49:48.840
the smartest person in the world. Their entire case depends on the fact that you will believe
00:49:54.700
they've been lying for five years, that they were lying about how insightful and smart Trump is,
00:50:01.920
because the entire case depends on him being smarter than all of us, because somehow he knew the Capitol
00:50:07.900
would get penetrated or that violence would happen in some way. But you didn't. You didn't know it.
00:50:14.980
I mean, I didn't know it. But I guess he's the smartest person in the world now, because he should
00:50:20.460
have known it. Have you heard the story about there was some angry phone call with McCarthy and Trump
00:50:30.940
during the Capitol assault, where people were breaking through McCarthy's windows and Trump allegedly was
00:50:38.400
not too concerned about it? Now, I don't know what did or did not happen in that phone call.
00:50:44.340
But I would say of all the news this week that you should not trust to be accurate,
00:50:49.780
it would be this story. These stories are never accurate. The ones where somebody's reporting with
00:50:56.800
somebody else said to somebody else, they're never accurate. Never. Like actually zero times,
00:51:04.180
you could depend on this to be true. Zero times. So, yeah, they just don't believe any of it.
00:51:17.420
The Democrats, when they got their final closing argument, amazingly, did not address the fact that
00:51:25.840
the Trump's lawyers had pointed out that they had manufactured evidence in a number of cases,
00:51:32.160
in a number of instances, manufactured evidence, faked evidence and showed it to the world in public.
00:51:41.160
That actually happened. And it got called out, not just the find people hoax video they showed,
00:51:48.040
but also there was the fake tweet that they took out of context and added a blue check.
00:51:53.820
And I saw Van Der Veen being interviewed by one of the CBS local stations, I think.
00:52:01.660
And, well, I tweeted it this morning. You have to see Van Der Veen answering the press
00:52:09.300
and just eviscerating the press. You have to see this.
00:52:15.960
But, as he pointed out, the Democrats didn't even address it.
00:52:23.920
They simply ignored the fact that the evidence had been manufactured by their own team.
00:52:31.020
Now, if the Democrats had even just an iota of, let's say,
00:52:37.120
usefulness or morality or ethics, the managers would have said,
00:52:46.040
oh my God, it looks like the evidence we presented wasn't even real.
00:52:50.760
And they should have just dropped the case and said, all right, you're right.
00:52:59.020
So, what do you make of the fact that they didn't even address the fact
00:53:09.040
Now, as Van Der Veen points out, if this had been a criminal trial,
00:53:14.780
If you know that the prosecution makes up evidence,
00:53:30.900
So, by far, the biggest story of the week, by far, there's nothing even close.
00:53:36.500
The impeachment itself is nowhere near how big this story is.
00:53:41.620
That the biggest hoax in this country that actually determined who's the president,
00:53:47.160
Biden is probably president because of the fine people hoax.
00:53:51.800
Now, not by itself, but it's so important that if you took that out,
00:53:58.820
It was so important to the misunderstanding of who this president is
00:54:03.360
that I think it determined the fate of the country.
00:54:07.140
And this was a lie perpetrated by Democrats and the press
00:54:20.740
I mean, I'm sure a lot more people died from that hoax
00:54:27.540
than the capital assault, as tragic as that was.
00:54:33.680
I think the fine people hoax is way more damaging,
00:54:53.420
Because remember, Van Der Veen actually used the phrase,
00:54:56.400
fine people hoax, which is the first time I've heard it
00:55:06.260
but hearing him say, actually, fine people hoax made my day.
00:55:14.920
Google the biggest story in the country, fine people hoax.
00:55:21.520
So, quotes around fine people hoax, the whole thing.
00:56:10.520
Now, the other entities are right-leading publications
00:56:16.460
If you had Googled this and you were a Democrat,
00:56:33.480
Breitbart is probably more accurate than any of them.
00:57:07.320
Because I'll bet if they had not directly tried to hide it,
00:57:31.020
Fox News should pop right up on the top, right?
00:57:45.380
The opinion people, of course, talked about it.