Episode 1858 Scott Adams: How Can Republicans Beat Biden's Fear Persuasion? I'll Tell You
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
140.52957
Summary
Is it too soon for Republicans to start asking for reparations for past wrongs done to them by the Democratic Party? Plus, a look at why it s so hard for Democrats to understand what happened in 2020 and why they won.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
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Yes, I was carried away with looking at stuff on Twitter.
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And yes, my IQ is still 185, according to the Internet.
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We can get different opinions from different sources, but finally, finally, we're here.
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Ladies and gentlemen, would you like to take it up a full notch?
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Remember, it's called the simultaneous sip, and it's the best thing that ever happened
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Is it too soon for Republicans to start asking for reparations?
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Because I feel like there's an argument to be made.
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Are not Republicans being discriminated against and demonized by their president?
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Are they not being jailed, in some cases, for political purposes and hunted?
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Now, what is the worst thing that's ever happened to the United States?
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But what is the least worst thing that actually got reparations?
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If we say, yeah, so the Japanese internment camps, one of the most horrible things the country
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Now, I don't know that anything that bad has happened to Republicans, except the ones in
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But where is that line where you can say, you know, you've crossed that line.
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Because it seems to me that what I witnessed for the last two years, maybe the last year,
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Seems like the country was sort of in a pretty good situation.
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With energy policy and, you know, Ukraine, whatever they're doing there.
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It feels as if, you know, the Republicans had things working pretty well, and it was just
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But I was, I think I was, I went down this path because I saw a fascinating little clip
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He tweeted around, I guess, I don't know when he was talking about it.
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But he talked about a way to understand what happened in 2020.
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So the normal frame is that there was something called an election.
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And then the two teams, they both said what they could do.
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And then the voters looked at those two competing propositions, and according to the official
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count, Biden won, according to, you know, according to the official outcome.
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The Democrats' strategy is to make their own people so uncomfortable that they'll do anything
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And the pain, the pain was a continuous fear that Trump was going to destroy the world.
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And I don't think you and I, you know, if you were not subject to that persuasion, I
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don't think you and I can appreciate how bad that must have been.
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Imagine waking up every day thinking the world is going to burn because Trump's the president.
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And, you know, they always say that winning elections is about what you're voting against.
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So, Biden managed to energize his base and give them something to vote against by making
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them so unhappy with their own lives that they would do anything to make the pain stop.
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Now, once you hear that explanation of what we saw, it's hard to lose it, isn't it?
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It's just a better framework for understanding what you just saw.
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It's the team that can torture their own people the hardest.
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If you put that together, that it's always voting against something, and usually there's
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It's not so much people are not voting for good times.
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Our system is two leaders who will torture their own supporters to see who can torture them
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the most, because who can ever scare them the most and make their own people the most uncomfortable?
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So we've literally developed a system to see who can torture their own supporters the most,
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and whoever is willing to do it, they get to win.
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That is an exact, perfect description of our system.
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Whoever can torture their own followers the hardest, they win the election.
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Because remember, you're not really convincing the other team.
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You're just trying to get your own people to get off the couch and do something.
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Now, I was asked on Twitter this morning, what could Republicans do to beat Biden's fear of persuasion?
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Because he's going for, instead of saying, here are all the good things I'll do for you,
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Biden is saying, watch out for those ultra-mega extremists.
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And Trump is who you should worry about, and anybody who followed it is Trump.
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What is the only technique that can beat fear of persuasion?
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High ground will not help you one bit against fear of persuasion.
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The high ground is just noise if you're afraid.
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You solve your fear first, and then you can hear the high ground argument.
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Now, I often incorrectly say the high ground wins every argument.
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But that's every argument where there's no fear.
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The normal situation is you're just in some corporate meeting,
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and you're talking about two options, neither of them are scary.
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But in the situations, and it's usually political,
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where you have an actual fear of life and death,
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Like, the stuff he's doing is completely unethical.
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Fear, the only thing that keeps people from using fear all the time
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Because when you scare people, they don't like it.
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So you have to be the bigger dick to win in a game of fear.
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So the person who can push the hardest and bend the boundaries the most,
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the one who is most, let's say, skilled at hyperbole,
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Now name one Republican who is not named Trump,
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Because you've seen his game, so you know what Biden can do.
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And you know what he's focusing on, the mega extremists, as he says.
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I mean, if you were going to choose somebody to run your government,
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I can't think of anything he ever said that scared me.
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As much as I love, you know, Tom Cotton, for example, as an alternative,
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Well, I just don't think he would bend the rules enough to get that done.
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So there's only one way you're going to beat Biden at this point,
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I hate to say it, but he's taking a Trumpian approach,
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And he's got that extra benefit of the media will back him
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and say that MAGA people are extremists and stuff like that.
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So here's the only thing that will get you a Republican president.
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I'm not saying he would be the best president or not the best.
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You know, there's a lot to be said for a DeSantis, a Tom Cotton.
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You know, there are other people you could say,
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well, they'd be really serious, serious candidates.
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But he's the only one who will bend the rules enough
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Nobody else is going to scare you enough to get you off the couch.
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He'll scare the fuck out of you if you want him to.
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He'll give you just what you need to get you off the couch.
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So I think Trump has the what will I do about it thing already covered
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which clearly seemed to be somewhat effective before,
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you know, he was doing better on a lot of things,
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all he really needs to do is scare you that Biden is coming for your guns
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and you're raising your taxes and he's going to destroy the whole country.
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I would look for a battle of fear for this next election.
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Do you remember the polls that came out after the 2020 election
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and Trump was questioning the outcome of the election?
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But then the polls came out and they asked people,
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And then the polls came up with basically the same answer
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And therefore proved that the election was fair
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because that's sort of an indirect way to do an audit.
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That you can poll people and find out who they voted for,
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check it against the actual result, they match, boom.
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The most important question in the entire country.
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And yet, there are all these professional polling companies
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who are in the business of gathering this exact information.
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about whether or not that actually has happened or not?
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Now, this again is, this gets back to the questions that we're not asking.
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If I were a news person, every time the question of the election came up, I would say, look,
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it's hard to know exactly what happened, but these exit polls support the outcome.
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Or they don't, or they don't, or they don't, I mean, I would imagine if they didn't, we'd know more about it.
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But I just asked that question, and I might have an answer to, let's see.
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Let me check, because I might actually have the answer to that question I asked it this morning.
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Um, so there was a, Rasmussen had a thread explaining this very thing.
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So May of this year, the question was asked, and Rasmussen dealt with it.
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How about a poll of likely voters to learn who they actually voted for?
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He says, great question, and we did one in August of 2021.
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He goes, according to, uh, is this interesting, by the way?
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Yeah, if I'm looking down, I can't see the comments.
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Okay, so this is, Rasmussen actually did a poll.
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Um, said, according to official sources, there were 158, blah, blah.
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So he's saying, uh, assuming these totals were accurate,
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this gives Biden a 4.5% win over Trump in the popular vote, right?
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So at the moment, we're not talking about the electoral votes.
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So if you polled and found that there was a 4.5% difference
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that would give you some confidence that the individual states
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were probably, you know, a little bit more likely to be correct,
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unless they, you know, magically canceled each other out,
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So if, if Rasmussen polled people and found something like a 4.5% gap,
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that would tell you that the election was fair,
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and you'd be, you'd feel pretty comfortable with that, wouldn't you?
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If Rasmussen polled and found out that the people
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Now, I know the electoral is a different, different concept, of course.
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So in August of 2021, they asked a simple question,
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Joe Biden beating Barack Obama's popular vote totals
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roughly matches the number of extra adults who voted.
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it, it mirrored the actual population change in the country.
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the number of people who voted is not the red flag.
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It's a flag, meaning you need to understand why.
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But the explanation for why sounded pretty good to me.
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Because it's easy to forget that in eight years,
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Like tens of millions of people in eight years.
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So I don't know if that's the full answer, by the way,
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is pretty close in their polling before the election.
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They're one of the closest ones after the election.
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can be extrapolated to the after-the-election polling.
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So that's sort of a big unexplained thing, isn't it?
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So here's the other problem with doing the check this way.
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I wonder how many people forget who they voted for.
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How many people do you think remember voting and didn't vote?
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have a false memory of voting and didn't vote at all?
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So, you know, there's a lot of human psychology
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that goes into knowing whether to trust these numbers,
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to put their own security monitoring video on Dropboxes?
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Let's say there was a Dropbox in your neighborhood.
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I think it's legal because it's a public space, right?
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And you could probably even find the cameras that you can charge
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and, you know, it'll last for like, I don't know, weeks or whatever.
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So you wouldn't, you know, you could actually just put a temporary camera.
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convincing us that the elections are legitimate?
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I'm not saying the elections are not legitimate.
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Maybe they have to be selected randomly, probably.
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I'm not sure how you can get the bias out of this,
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And if you got the right representative sample,
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which is if they're only calling your wired phone,