Episode 795 Scott Adams： Impeachment Theater Winners and Losers, Shadowbanning Update, Food From Air
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks impeachment, shadow banning, and the mysterious disappearance of conservative voices on the social media platform, and why it could have something to do with politics. Plus, a special impeachment flavor.
Transcript
00:00:05.400
You're all here, and it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
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We're going to be talking about this impeachment stuff,
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You've got to be in your best frame of mind for this,
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and all it takes is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein,
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day,
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the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
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I'm sorry if I'm displaying my white privilege by using a public platform.
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And so I continue to be amazed that my trolls disappeared suddenly.
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It could be because I was playing with the filters.
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So Twitter has some filters to allow you to get rid of.
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I think some of the filters are you can block people who don't have a picture in their photos.
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I think you can block people who are new accounts.
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And I'm talking about the ones who would always come in with the same three or four comments.
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And they only happened in 2016 and then they disappeared for a while, but they would flare up now and then.
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But for reasons I don't know, they all disappeared.
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But that doesn't mean that we have reached the end of our questions about conservatives especially being throttled or shadow banned.
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I noticed a few days ago that when I tried to follow Richard Grinnell, Ambassador Grinnell, that I thought I had followed him.
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But then it suggested that I follow him on the list of suggested people to follow.
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And then it suggested that I follow him again the next day.
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And I thought, is it possible that twice I thought I followed him and didn't?
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And I said, have any of you tried to follow Ambassador Grinnell and found that you were automatically unfollowed?
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If you look at the comments to that tweet, and I tweeted again today just to alert people to look at the comments.
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Now, Ambassador Grinnell noticed that I was talking about this, and he thanked me just for raising this issue.
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But if you look at the number of people in the comments who are quite sure they followed him and are quite sure they got unfollowed, many of them just discovering because I pointed it out.
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So a lot of people didn't know it, they just said, well, I'm following him, let me check.
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And then they checked and they had been automatically unfollowed.
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And I did put in a message to Jack Dorsey to ask him if there's some official Twitter response, because I don't know what the official company position is.
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But I'll tell you my hypothesis, all right, and it's just a hypothesis, so don't put too much credibility on it.
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But I think there are roughly three main possibilities.
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The one would be that Twitter senior management is intentionally ordering their employees to game the system for some political game.
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I would call that deeply unlikely for this particular topic, the following and the unfollowing.
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It is so, to imagine that they're doing it intentionally and that it's coming from the top, would imagine that they were all idiots.
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Because you'd have to be really an idiot to bet your entire company, because that's what this would be.
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Betting the entire company and your reputation that something so easily discovered by me, and obviously many of you can discover it just as easily.
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So if it's completely obvious and heavy-handed, those two don't go together.
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Because you wouldn't do a clever political scheme to bias the elections if it were also perfectly obvious and discoverable by anybody who looked.
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So what are the odds that senior management, again, we're talking about very smart people here.
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We're talking about people who have started billion-dollar companies and people who are at the top of that management heap.
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I don't believe, I mean, it just stretches my credibility to beyond where I can take it, that it would be intentional and obvious at the same time.
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And it's a bug that, you know, happens to everybody, but maybe we just notice it in cases where we're looking.
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And it could be a case of where you think you've followed somebody, you think you've liked something,
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but maybe your app is not doing a good handshake with, you know, the central processors.
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But here, again, that would be so hard to believe.
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Because it's such a massive bug that it would certainly at least be public.
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In other words, if it were a bug that size that is affecting, you know, God knows how many people,
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and it happens on a regular basis and has been happening for years,
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if that were the case, it would just be public knowledge.
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It probably would be included in the direction somewhere.
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You know, if you press this, we can't guarantee it'll take or something like that.
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But more to the point, do you think in the year 2020 that Twitter doesn't know how to build an app
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where if the app sends some information to the central processor,
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it doesn't have a process to make sure that the handshake happened?
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I mean, maybe, maybe it's a bug, but it seems so unlikely.
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But I'm looking at the main possibilities, and I'm just putting some odds on them.
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So I think the odds that it's intentional and coming from Twitter management, almost zero.
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The odds that it's a bug, and we don't, first of all, know about it and it isn't getting fixed,
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I mean, you can never really completely rule out stuff like this.
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There's somebody who has control of their system that is not in the management chain.
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Because one of the easiest ways to get access to somebody's algorithm is find some programmers
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who have access and offer them millions of dollars to tweak something.
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Now, if I had to guess of all of the possible explanations, there's one of them that's actually
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kind of normal and typical, and it's that last one.
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Unfortunately, we live in a world where it would not be hard for a motivated, bad actor
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to find an employee in one of these big social media companies and just bribe them.
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It's not that expensive if you're talking about billionaires and maybe foreign countries
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Maybe they were just partisans who found themselves in the right job and took advantage of it.
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But I'm going to go with bad actor somewhere under the hood as my top hypothesis.
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So I've got a message in to Jack Dorsey asking if there's any official explanation I'll be
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Now, I've also been keeping you updated that my Twitter feed, I'm sorry, not my Twitter
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feed, my YouTube videos get routinely demonetized.
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But apparently I have now complained about that enough that I have Google's attention.
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And although I haven't followed up, I did get an email yesterday from somebody whose job
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So it turns out Google's a big company and there's a job for everything.
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And apparently there's somebody whose job, their actual job, includes the responsibilities
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of figuring out why people like me are complaining about being demonetized.
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So apparently it's enough of a problem that there's somebody whose job it is to find out
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Now, a preliminary hypothesis there is that trolls are reporting it.
00:11:07.220
So it could be that Google is just responding to the fact that there are lots of complaints
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and until we manually ask for a review, they don't notice that the complaints don't match
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up with the material until they look at it manually.
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Maybe, because it wouldn't be crazy that Google's system would automatically block something if
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it got a lot of complaints until they sorted it down.
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It seems like that would be a reasonable thing to do, but it would allow just this huge gaping
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problem, which would be that trolls could illegitimately get you demonetized.
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So if I had to guess, that's my top hypothesis, is that trolls are complaining and they just
00:11:57.760
Now, there might be a workaround, so I'll talk to Google and let you know how that goes.
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So, I guess we need to talk about impeachment, eh?
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Who did you think won the first round of impeachment theater?
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Because it's sort of like, it's turned into sort of a reality TV show.
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Honestly, I'm watching this impeachment stuff and I don't even feel that it has something
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to do with government, because I think both sides have acknowledged that we know how it
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And if you know how it ends, and how it ends is not going to affect the government, at
00:12:39.560
least in terms of removing a president, all that's left is the theater.
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And it's obvious that the participants are playing to the audience.
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Unfortunately, they're also boring the heck out of the audience.
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But if you're like me, did you have, I watched enough of it yesterday, that I felt as though
00:13:09.720
It is so impressive to watch the best, you know, some of the best attorneys in the world
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Because you may have the same experience I had.
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You'll hear one of the attorneys make their case, and I'll be sitting at home and I'll
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If I heard that argument, I'd be inclined to agree with that lawyer.
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And then the other lawyer from the other side gets up and just demolishes the argument
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and makes another argument that's so strong you say, huh, guess I've got to change my opinion.
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So it's fascinating to watch my view of reality change in real time.
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It looks like they've really, really nailed it.
00:14:03.120
Now, you may be, those of you who are a little more partisan are probably saying, oh, one
00:14:08.860
side is winning every time and the other side is losing every time.
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But I'll tell you what's the most absurd part about this whole process.
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The absurdity is that it's something called a trial.
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And yet, there's apparently, there's nothing in the process that stops people from standing
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Now, I'm not going to say it's only happening on one side.
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Because of the news sources I'm watching, I'm seeing more of it, more of the accusations
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I don't need to check because I already know they're saying that Trump's lawyers are lying
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and they're going to show their evidence and they're going to show what they said, etc.
00:15:01.780
Now, I can't necessarily sort it all out, but I can say with some confidence that people
00:15:08.280
are intentionally lying in front of the public and there's no repercussions.
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They can just stand up there and say anything they want as long as they don't, as long as
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they're not mean to each other, Chief Justice Roberts is going to let them go.
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I guess he, I guess he warned them to be a little more professional.
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But that's the only thing he warned them on, you know, to be a little more respectful to
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But in terms of lying, it's just a, it's a free, it's a free market.
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And so I ask you, if there are no rules of evidence, you know, no normal ways that you
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get to the bottom of whether the fact is really a fact or not, what the hell good is this?
00:16:00.540
I mean, it's one thing that we all think we know where it ends, and that makes it a ridiculous,
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In what universe could the process as it exists possibly work?
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Because both sides are deeply, they're deeply incentivized to lie.
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You might as well lie, because the system rewards it.
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It's the damnedest thing, the worst system I've ever seen.
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All right, let's talk about some of the fun, small stories within the big story.
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First of all, I can't tell, I don't think the public can tell who's winning or losing in
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People are just going to grab whatever fact they understand and say, well, I understand
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this one variable, so I base my decision on it.
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But here's the most fun thing that came out of yesterday.
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What I'm going to tell you next is just delicious.
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News, I mean, news has just become entertainment now.
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I mean, this whole impeachment thing, it's hard to see it as anything but a reality TV
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But by far the coolest, best, most entertaining thing that came out of it came from Alan Dershowitz's
00:17:42.940
Dershowitz says that everybody's wrong about the president already being impeached and that
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Because as Dershowitz explains, if the Senate acquits him, he's not impeached.
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Have you heard anybody who actually knows what they're talking about?
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I'm talking about a constitutional scholar type person like Dershowitz.
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Has anybody but him said on an interview, no, you're all wrong.
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There is no impeachment if the Senate votes it out.
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Now, I assume that by today we'll see experts on the other side saying, no, no, no.
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Oh, yes, it's impeachment, even if the Senate votes against it.
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It's not that somebody's saying something I would love to hear, because I think it would
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I'd like the Dershowitz opinion on this to be true.
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Our two world, you know, two movies on one screen is preserved, no matter what happens.
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So the vote's going to happen, and the people who say, he's impeached forever, he's got a stain
00:19:19.220
They're going to be able to say that, because they have their argument, and the people who
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support the president, who don't want to say that, are going to say, well, you know, you
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can say that, but let's look at the constitutional expert, Alan Dershowitz, says no impeachment,
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Whoever gets to Wikipedia and makes their edit a stick, wins.
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Because you can't trust the news to tell you if he was impeached or not impeached.
00:20:06.140
So nobody's going to look at the news to find out if he's impeached.
00:20:13.340
But there isn't really a history book written yet.
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And Wikipedia is going to be a battleground of competing editors who say,
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Now, maybe Wikipedia will battle to a standstill,
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and they'll just put both points of view and say, well, there's a controversy,
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But I love the fact that Dershowitz is very clearly giving cover
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to anybody who later wants to make the claim that the president wasn't impeached.
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Do you know who else is going to make that argument that the president wasn't impeached,
00:21:03.260
Do you think President Trump is ever going to say in public,
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So that'll be a fun battle for whose reality wins.
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Now, I told you yesterday that Alan Dershowitz had said in 1998 about the Clinton trial
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that impeachment doesn't necessarily have to be a crime.
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You know, it could be, you know, it doesn't have to technically be a crime on the books.
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And then he's clarified, and then he said he retracts his old statement.
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If it was in any way in conflict with his current views,
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he retracts his old views and says, you know, I've done more research.
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And the current view is that it still needs to be, it doesn't need to be a crime.
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He always said it doesn't need to be a technical crime.
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But based on his scholarly research, updated, it needs to be crime-like.
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They're just two good examples to give you the idea.
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One is, let's say some president had done something, and it was discovered.
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But let's say, and I'm going to amp up his example a little bit.
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Let's say it was one day after the statute of limitations had just run out.
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It was a horrible crime, but we don't find out about it until the president's in office and it's one day past the statute of limitations.
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I think he would have had to do it in the office, and then the statute of limitations still expires or something like that.
00:23:10.280
But anyway, so one example would be society definitely means this to be a crime.
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It's just that for a technical reason, it wasn't.
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Let's say somebody got accused of a crime and they were acquitted by the courts, but only because there was some problem with collecting the evidence or something.
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Another one was, suppose he did a horrible crime, but he did it while he was overseas.
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You can imagine a president going to some other country, and I don't have to give you examples because you can think of your own.
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Something horrible happens, let's say, in his personal dealings.
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But it's not a crime because he happens to be in the country where that's just not criminal.
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But maybe we want to treat it like that in this country because to us it's exactly like one of our crimes, so it's crime-like.
00:24:09.500
Now, I love those examples because they begin to give you a little bit of a sense of what it means to be like a crime, but not actually being a crime.
00:24:21.880
And then you can imagine that the framers of the Constitution wanted to make sure that they picked up all the exceptions, so they just threw that crime-like thing, understanding, in there.
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The impeachment articles do not allege a crime.
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So what would be crime-like in terms of abuse of power?
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What would be the most crime-like, what is a crime that's not abuse of power but is, like, really close to it?
00:25:03.600
There's nothing that's almost like abuse of power by the president that's also a criminal act.
00:25:14.020
Now, corruption and bribery, those are pretty specific.
00:25:18.400
But coercing a foreign power to do something that may or may not be for the national interest, there's just nothing on the books that's sort of in that ballpark, apparently.
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So it looks like, and Dershowitz says what I've been saying, which is they should just vote on the constitutionality of it and be done with it.
00:25:40.160
Because digging into the details does nothing but give Schiff lots of opportunity to show the public details in his maybe biased, lying way, and that's not good.
00:25:53.120
So I don't know why there's somebody on the president's team who's not taking Dershowitz's advice on, you know, just vote on the constitutionality of it and go home.
00:26:08.860
One of the things that Schiff did, and then I think one of the other Democratic impeachment managers showed, was they actually showed a hoax video.
00:26:23.840
And by hoax video, I mean it's deceptively edited to change the meaning.
00:26:27.740
And it's the video where the president says in his own words, I think this is close to his own words, that I can do anything I want.
00:26:37.720
And they take it out of context, so it looks like he's saying that as a president, I'm above the law, I can do anything I want.
00:26:45.700
If you see it in context, he was talking about I can do anything I want on, I forget what it was, but a specific question in which he could do anything he wanted.
00:26:54.040
So what he said is not, what he actually said is not in dispute, I don't believe, by anybody.
00:27:01.980
There's no lawyer anywhere who disputes what he actually said.
00:27:06.340
But if you cut out the context, which they did, and they showed a hoax video in the Senate.
00:27:16.100
An intentional hoax video twice on the same day.
00:27:24.040
I was, I'm being told in the comments, reminded that when he said he could do anything he wants, it had to do with whether he could hire or fire people in the executive branch.
00:27:41.080
He can do anything he wants in terms of hiring and firing, within reason.
00:27:45.700
So, don't you wonder what Chief Justice Roberts was thinking?
00:27:53.780
Because apparently he doesn't have power to jump in and manage the proceedings other than just the ceremonial parts that he's doing.
00:28:06.640
Now, maybe he didn't know that it was a deceptive hoax video, maybe, but he probably knew.
00:28:14.640
And he had to sit there, the head of the Supreme Court.
00:28:18.760
Just imagine his mindset, you know, just for a moment.
00:28:22.500
You know, I'm not going to say that I know what he was thinking, but imagine what he was thinking.
00:28:26.080
He, he's the person who is most, let's say, he has the greatest responsibility in the entire country for making sure that the citizens play fair with each other.
00:28:43.180
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that's his primary thing in life, is that people play fair.
00:28:54.380
But he had to sit there and watch, in the Senate, the most respected, often it's said, the most respected body, governmental body, of just about anywhere.
00:29:08.920
And he had to watch Schiff play a hoax video, and then another one play a hoax video right in front of him.
00:29:21.880
I think I would have held up my hand and said, you know, I understand my role, and it's not to get involved.
00:29:27.420
But you just showed a video that's a hoax video in front of the whole world in the Senate.
00:29:35.000
I mean, I suppose there's a lot of verbal lying in the Senate, so people are used to it.
00:29:49.120
One of the things that Schiff and company are suggesting, and this is my own words I'm putting on this,
00:29:56.540
is that the president mounting a legal defense is tantamount to admitting guilt.
00:30:07.540
Now, of course, I'm putting my own words on what they're saying.
00:30:11.540
But their version of it was, and one of the impeachment managers said this, I can't remember her name.
00:30:16.620
She said that she had worked in law enforcement before being in government
00:30:22.140
and that she knew that anybody who had evidence that did not hurt them or show their innocence
00:30:33.140
And therefore, because the president is not allowing these documents
00:30:41.260
not allowing them to talk under the assumption of executive privilege, presidential privilege,
00:30:48.640
that that alone is strong evidence of his guilt.
00:30:59.880
Because in the United States, you can fight like a wounded badger for your defense.
00:31:09.640
And the smartest thing you can do is to block every, if you can, if you can do it legally,
00:31:16.160
you have to do it legally, but if you can, you want to block every source of information from the prosecution.
00:31:25.960
Remember, there's lots and lots of documents, lots and lots of people whose memories are maybe different
00:31:32.540
about what happened, people making assumptions.
00:31:35.620
If you open all that up, you're guaranteed that the other team is going to find some snippet,
00:31:43.160
a text message, an email that could be taken more than one way.
00:31:49.600
You just gave the other side some ammunition and it wasn't even real.
00:31:53.680
It's just something that looked real, because in a context, you'd say,
00:31:57.560
oh, if I saw that out of context, that would look kind of damning.
00:32:05.100
You don't want the judge to see that, because it's just something they're taking out of context.
00:32:10.560
So the only way you can prevent stuff taken out of context
00:32:14.800
is that you fight as hard as you can legally within the legal system
00:32:19.400
to prevent the prosecution, or whoever's acting as a prosecutor in this case.
00:32:27.880
It's exactly the same reason why a president with, let's say,
00:32:32.280
President Trump's complicated tax return situation,
00:32:37.960
people said, well, if he had nothing to hide, why wouldn't he just let us look at him?
00:32:47.320
Nobody who has experience in the real world would say something so dumb.
00:32:51.980
The reason you don't let the public and your critics see your tax returns,
00:32:56.960
I mean, one reason could be you're trying to hide stuff,
00:32:59.040
but an equally strong reason, and just as compelling,
00:33:03.060
which has to be the first reason you would consider,
00:33:22.700
So I would say that's the most offensive thing that the Democrats are saying,
00:33:29.680
is that the Trump team using the legal process,
00:33:37.220
to put some obstacles in the way of the prosecution,
00:33:46.680
It's amazing that we elect people who can say things like that in public.
00:33:52.700
Have you noticed all of the loser-think going on in the arguments?
00:34:00.900
Both sides have done two of the biggest loser-think errors,
00:34:05.400
as I read about in my best-selling book called Loser-Think,
00:34:13.700
One of them is they imagine that they can read the minds of strangers.
00:34:20.300
Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.
00:34:28.200
or the reason the president doesn't want to have this
00:34:38.940
and put the worst possible interpretation on it
00:34:45.440
They're both saying that they know the motives of the other.
00:34:50.380
but it's just the worst thing in the world to assume that.
00:34:56.780
Now, remember, one of the arguments from the president's staff
00:35:00.220
is that they're doing mind reading about his intentions,
00:35:03.980
and you don't want to have a system that lets people get punished
00:35:10.240
Here's the most interesting sort of legal argument factoid I've seen.
00:35:23.800
but I think I can simplify this to the point where you understand it.
00:35:29.540
one of the few people who probably read all these documents
00:35:32.600
in terms of the arguments coming from the White House,
00:35:36.200
pulled down one of the arguments and highlighted it in a tweet.
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Listen to this argument from the lawyers for the president.
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you have to have two-thirds of the Senate vote,
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meaning they'd have to agree and vote the same way,
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that this is specifically the reason they're impeaching.
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You want two-thirds of the Senate to be very specific.
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But, because of the way the impeachment has been structured,
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It's a laundry list of bad things the president has done.
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caused two-thirds of the people to vote the way they did.
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You wouldn't know if you got two-thirds for any of them.
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that they know that they're voting for the same thing.
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Otherwise, you don't know if you got two-thirds