Episode 156: Scott Adams Talks About Gaslighting, the Dossier, the Cohen Tapes
Date: 2018-07-25 | Duration: 26:27
Topics
Carter Page FISA application… Did it ONLY contain dossier information? Why don’t we know? The Michael Cohen tapes Criticizing attacks on the press…assumes the press is credible The news is a narrative rather than reporting
Transcript
[0:06] Put on pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom. Come in here everybody. Come on, gather round because it’s time. It’s time again for the highlight of your day so far anyway. It features a little thing I call coffee and a little thing I call the simultaneous sip. It’s coming. Oh, it’s coming. And it’s the best sip of the day. Get your day starting off right. Here it comes.
Yep, that’s some good simultaneous sipping. In response to somebody’s comment I just saw going by: this is a V-neck T-shirt. V-neck T-shirts are still okay. The V-neck sweater means your wife dressed you. [1:08] Big difference.
So the news is getting fun again. Have you noticed that there are cycles? There are some cycles where the news is no fun and then it’s fun again for a while, and then it’s no fun for a while. We’re in a fun stage. Let’s first talk about Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels has announced, apparently, that she is getting divorced. The accusation from her ex, among other things, is that she cheated on him. Now, I’ve been wondering how Michael Avenatti gets paid. Seems like a lawyer like him would be very expensive. Seems like he’s doing a lot of work for his client, putting in a lot of hours, and I don’t know how she could possibly afford that much lawyering. [2:10] Now it’s making me wonder if he is working pro boner. For, you know what I mean? Let’s drink to that.
I’m just going to let that one sit there for a while. Yes, I said pro boner. Let’s move on. I’m noticing that the anti-Trumpers are using the word gaslighting a lot. Gaslighting—if you don’t know the exact definition, I think it refers to a movie, maybe a Hitchcock movie—but the idea is that you tell lies and then you convince people that they’re crazy if they don’t believe it. The real goal is to drive people crazy. So it’s not just that you’re telling a lot of lies; it’s that you’re telling a lot of lies with the intention of making somebody [3:12] else think they’re crazy because the things they see as truth, they start believing are lies.
I’m thinking to myself, gaslighting would make sense as an explanation, or at least a potential explanation, if the only source of untruth was Trump, or at least one side. But in a world where absolutely everybody is lying, what does it mean to say one of them is trying to sell you a story of reality that isn’t exactly right? The whole gaslighting thing only works if everybody isn’t doing it. Literally everyone is dealing in untruth, or shading the truth, or [4:14] ignoring important parts and focusing on the unimportant parts. If everyone is involved in this, it’s hard to pick out any one person and say, “Well, that one’s doing a little gaslighting; these other people are just wrong,” or maybe you think they’re right.
I’ve noticed something in the last maybe week or so. I want to see if you could look for this. I can’t tell if this is the sign of a change, maybe a trend or not, but I have seen CNN be more fair toward President Trump. Has anybody noticed that? Have you seen more fairness about Trump just in the last week or so? The story of Chris Cuomo, who I thought did a very credible job of explaining both sides of a situation—you don’t really see that that often. It was unusual enough that I called it out, [5:17] like, “Hey, that was actually an accurate description of what the people on the other side are saying.”
There are at least two anecdotes recently of Jake Tapper also being completely, in my opinion, objective about something going right for Trump. He tweeted, for example, the article about the satellites. They showed one of the missiles—the missile place being decommissioned or dismantled in North Korea. Now, other people have said, “Hey, you have to look at it in context; the site might not have been that important,” and maybe that’s true, but it’s still a rocket-launching test site, and it is being dismantled. Jake retweeted it without any negative comment, just as [6:17] a positive that’s happening for the president.
Then there was a clip I just saw where Jake Tapper opened up a segment. He had some guests, and he opened it up by saying that it’s actually true that President Trump is tougher on Russia than Obama was. His guests actually laughed out loud, or at least one of them did, about how crazy that is. I can’t read minds, but it looked like there was some doubt in that laughter, and I thought to myself, “Well, that is also objectively true because you can point to the specific things that are happening now of the sanctions and the giving weapons to Ukraine.” That just wasn’t happening before. So Jake, being a historian by training and probably by inclination, wasn’t ready to—apparently had no interest in shading the history [7:18] of it, and so he gave a completely objective take on that which actually stood out so much that somebody retweeted it. Look for that. There might be some kind of a shift going on, or it could be a coincidence. I don’t know, but we’ll see if there’s more of that.
Now, I know the thing you want me to talk about the most is the Cohen tape. Have you all heard the Michael Cohen tape? I think this tape should seal your belief that we live in a simulation. What are the odds, in the same half of a year that we all dealt with Laurel and Yanny, that we would have a tape that you can hear whatever you want to hear on it? [8:20] I’ve listened to that thing a bunch of times.
My take on the tape is that you can’t tell anything, really. My take on it is that Trump did say something about cash, but he said it in an attitude that would suggest it was a bad idea, and that Cohen agreed by saying, “No, no, no,” as in agreeing with Trump that cash was a bad idea. I haven’t heard anybody give that interpretation before. Everybody sees exactly what they want to see, so it’s sort of this big Rorschach test. Would I tell you that my interpretation of that tape is accurate? I would not. I certainly know enough to know that I could hear this completely wrong.
Just to make it more [9:21] interesting, it gets clipped off so you can’t hear the full context, and there are mumbled parts. It is everything you would want in an ambiguous tape. You can literally hear anything you want on that tape. It’s either proving something bad happened or not. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure why the cash part mattered. I think the question that everybody was wondering is: was the president aware of Michael Cohen’s actions? Because he said he wasn’t. To which I say: duh.
Let me reiterate for those of you who were born yesterday: if you’re an elected official and you get accused of cheating on your wife, denying everything is a pretty good strategy. [10:23] I don’t think there’s anybody on either side who has any mystery whatsoever about exactly what happened here. What happened is exactly what it looks like was accused, and you just saw somebody handling it the way somebody would normally handle a situation. There’s not a lot there because it’s exactly what it looks like, and nobody cares. It can be exactly what it looks like and still not matter.
I think that’s where we’re at now. Here’s an interesting thing: everybody’s still talking about the FISA warrant for Carter Page, and the big question is, was the dossier the only reason it was granted, or was the dossier just mentioned as context and there were other things that were more verified [11:25] that made the dossier not necessary for the warrant? Was it just kind of background, maybe a little color? You’re hearing both of those sides being argued, and people are very sure one way or the other. You’re seeing the “Laurel and Yanny” thing. It’s funny, somebody said, “Your Laurel and Yannis,” and then you’ve got Lanny Davis. Lanny is a combination of Laurel and Yanny. Lanny Davis is the lawyer who’s arguing this. What are the odds of that? That is weird.
Anyway, back to the FISA warrant. Somebody asked me on Twitter, “Can you name anything that’s in the FISA warrant that did not come from the dossier?” The simplest, most basic question, right? The most basic thing that we should know by now, all of us watching this story, is: [12:28] what was the evidence in the FISA warrant that you can say did not come from the dossier? I looked at that tweet and I said, “I’m pretty sure there were things, but why don’t I know them?” Look at the news industry; both sides have completely failed you.
Do you know something that was in there? Let me put it another way. If the story on the right—let’s say the pro-Trumpers—if their story is there is nothing in there except the dossier information, why don’t they say that? Because that would be the whole story. There’s absolutely nothing else there except the dossier, and therefore it’s illegitimate. But they don’t say that, do they? The people who are arguing that the dossier was fake [13:30] and shouldn’t have been in there, they don’t exactly say that only the dossier was used. They say something like, “Well, it was instrumental. It was key. It was critical to it. It wouldn’t have happened without it.” That’s different, isn’t it?
So I’m pretty sure the right is misleading me. Now, I saw an article by Mollie Hemingway, who you’re all familiar with—one of the very best voices in politics right now. I think she’s an attorney by training, but when she breaks something down, it’s always the clearest explanation. I started reading the article, and it got long and complicated, and I bailed out after a while. But even in that—and maybe it was in the article that I bailed out because [14:33] I just didn’t have the patience to deal with the detail—but shouldn’t there have been something in the title or the headline if it were true? “I’m going to show you there’s nothing but the dossier, and everything else is just stuff that came from the dossier”—was that in there? I don’t know, because if that was the point of it, it would have been in the title or the first paragraph.
Why is it that the most basic thing the public needs to know, we’re not hearing from either the left or the right? Why is that? The news should be lighting up. Does anybody know that? Having a few days go by, can anybody give one example of something that wasn’t in the dossier that was part of the argument? Can anybody do that right now? Because if you [15:36] can’t—well, if you’re counting on the redacted part, really? Is that the argument, that the real information is in the redacted part? It might be, but I’m not seeing Carter Page being a paid Kremlin adviser; that’s not in there.
So how many of you had an opinion about the FISA warrant, and I don’t see anybody suggesting anything that was in there except the dossier? I assume I’m wrong about that, by the way. Just to be completely clear: [16:37] I believe I’m wrong that there’s nothing but the dossier in there, but both sides seem to be suggesting there is more than the dossier. I read Andrew McCarthy’s piece, and I still don’t have an answer. If it’s in there, it’s woven into a longer narrative, and I couldn’t pull it out. Does Andrew McCarthy say in clear language, “There is zero evidence except for what’s in the dossier”? Does he say that? I don’t think he says that, does he? Why don’t we know what those other pieces are?
Somebody’s saying “exactly.” So I make that my challenge to you: [17:37] see if you can figure out what the anti-Trumpers believe is in there that they would call evidence that is not from the dossier. It’s not good enough to say that some things in the dossier might be true. That’s not the question. The question is: is there anything that didn’t come from the dossier?
I’m just looking at your comments. We’ve entered a completely fact-free world, which I believe I warned you two years ago was coming. Is there any prediction I’ve made that was more accurate than that? Some of you have been with me since the beginning, and you remember that I said—it’s actually the subtitle of my book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. There was a time when [18:41] people were saying, “Hey, we got the facts right, but the other side has them wrong.” In that world, facts still matter. But doesn’t it look to you like nobody’s using facts anymore? We’re both listening to this tape and hearing completely different things. If anybody has a fact out of that, it’s probably imaginary. Everybody’s looking at the Russia situation and has a different interpretation, but none of the interpretations are based on fact. Mueller might have some facts, but we don’t know what they are. So we are in a completely fact-free world in which—well, let me segue from that because it makes sense as the next topic.
I’m seeing a lot of pundits wringing their hands and crying on TV, figuratively speaking, that the president [19:41] is criticizing our trusted institutions, and in particular, he’s criticizing the press. The thought is that if he degrades the press, it will be bad for the world. Do you know what’s wrong with that? It takes as an assumption that the press is doing its job legitimately. Don’t you have to, before you can say it’s wrong to criticize them, start with the assumption that there’s nothing to criticize, or at least nothing of substance?
I watch all the people who are saying, “You can’t criticize the press. That’s bad. He might degrade the institution of the press to the point where, even after he’s left office, it never recovers.” [20:43] There’s a big assumption in that, and the assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with the press and that it does not deserve the criticism it’s getting. Yet, that is the most obvious truth that we can see. It’s very clear that both sides are engaged in nothing like truth. It’s all spin; it’s all opinion now wrapped in speculation.
I’ve given you this assignment before, but watch CNN and watch how many times they make an appeal to mind-reading. It’s subtle, and it’ll be things like, “President Trump believes that if he does this…” It doesn’t matter what follows, because if you’re talking about a stranger’s internal process, you really don’t know that. You can only know what he’s doing. Sometimes you can intuit [21:44] motives if they’re really obvious, but most of the time we can’t because it’s a complicated world and people do things for more than one reason. If you have more than one explanation for a thing, how much of the reason is which?
I’ve said two things today. I think they’re both true, which is that the press has been completely non-credible, and so the president’s accusations of fake news are completely on point. I would argue that the president’s criticism of the press is a hundred percent constructive. Now, that doesn’t mean—and far from it—it definitely doesn’t mean that everything he calls “fake news” is actually unreal. That’s a slightly different point. But the general sense that the news is a [22:45] narrative as opposed to reporting—he’s completely right about that. That’s clear and obvious on both sides of the aisle. So when he criticizes the news, that feels constructive to me because it might be part of the reason that CNN is suffering in the ratings, and it might be part of what brings some back. They might make a pivot away from the narrative and toward the factual. It’s possible.
Did I ever talk about James Gunn? I’ll just say that I didn’t realize that he had gone after me on Twitter at some point in the past, and I had completely missed it. Somebody pointed it out; he had some insulting tweet about me. [23:50] So I say: block that Nazi. My only comment about James Gunn is that he’s a Nazi because he acts like one. The other accusations—have at it. You can speculate all you want about what’s in his soul and whether his tweets were over the line. I put that all under the Nazi category. Nazi for sure.
I saw a clip of some folks in Auckland beating up what they called a Nazi. Maybe it was a Nazi; I didn’t know who it was. But far more likely, it was just somebody wearing a red hat. I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. I’m pretty sure that Nazis are the crowd that are beating up people for their [24:56] opinions.” We’re in what I’d call the “Nazi transition,” where the Nazis are clearly on the left at least as much as on the right—probably a lot more, probably ten-to-one at this point. I’m defining a Nazi as someone who’s going after people personally as opposed to someone who disagrees on policy. The policy people are fine. The Nazis are the ones who go after you personally in any kind of way. So, probably ten-to-one Nazis on the left at the moment. That will change over time.
I think I’ve covered my topics for today. Is there anything else? [25:56] Oh, let me talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m never going to know her name. Can somebody tell me what her name is again? Alexandria or Alexandra Cortez… AOC? Let’s call her AOC. So I’ve watched Ocasio-Cortez—thank you—I’ve watched…