Episode 199 Scott Adams: Jeffrey Toobin’s TDS and Whatnot
Date: 2018-08-29 | Duration: 29:40
Topics
Jeffrey Toobin says Antifa is a black organization? TDS victims like Toobin are just flailing around with angry opinions The CNN dilemma, stirring up racial unrest Why can’t social media users see what they want to see? CNN’s Camerota attempts to create news (Sununu interview)
Transcript
Intro and Learning Drums
Pop pop boom ba-ba-boom! Hello Savannah, hello unikz Rabb, and all you people coming in via Joe Tyler. Come on in. I’m a little bit late this morning, which means you probably already have your coffee with you. No, you didn’t miss it yet; you’re just in time. Just in time for this simultaneous sip. Oh, that’s good. That’s good stuff.
I hope you were fast enough. Somebody asked me if I’m playing drums. I am taking drum lessons by video and it really works. I’m not sure it’ll work for every part of learning the drums, but for getting started, getting the basics, and having enough to practice and stuff, totally works. Video learning, at least in that context, worked pretty well.
Jeffrey Toobin’s Antifa Comments
I’m going to play a video from Jeffrey Toobin at CNN. He’s talking about President Trump’s quotes. President Trump said something about how if he were impeached, there could be violence. Listen to Jeffrey Toobin—we’ll see if you can hear this well. He says: “The theme here is ‘I’m Donald Trump and I’ll protect you from the scary black people.’ Antifa is widely perceived as an African-American organization, and this is just part of the same story of LeBron James and Don Lemon and Maxine Waters and the NFL players and the UCLA basketball players. This is about black versus white.”
Now, I don’t know if any of you could hear that; I might have to find a better clip. But Jeffrey Toobin was saying that when the President criticizes Antifa, he’s really criticizing black people because “everybody knows” Antifa is a black organization. Did any of you think Antifa was a black organization? I thought it was a white organization. How many times have we seen video of Antifa? Like a billion times. It looks like it’s 95 percent white.
To report that on CNN like it’s a fact—now, he’s not a reporter, he is a legal pundit—but somebody needs to correct that, don’t they? Or am I wrong? And then he takes that and he lumps it with criticisms of LeBron James and football kneelers to say that it’s a black versus white thing. When I watched Toobin do this, and I know that he’s talking to people who may be less informed—they’re going to believe this stuff, right? Is Jeffrey Toobin losing it? I mean, just losing his mind? Because it looks like that. I’m not going to make that assumption in terms of how it looks—it looks like he’s losing his mind—but I’m not diagnosing him medically.
Trump Derangement Syndrome and CNN
It feels to me like we’ve reached another level of Trump Derangement Syndrome where they’re flailing, just flailing around to try to find something that they can hurt the President with. It’s been a bad week for CNN because they are widely being accused of peddling fake news that they don’t want to recant for some reason—news that other outlets have already recanted. So they’re having a tough month, and the President’s having a good week. It’s starting to look like everything that CNN has been telling the public for at least three years about the President and about politics might just be all their angry opinions.
As the President becomes more successful—which is also similar to being in less legal trouble—as Mueller continues to come up with nothing but Hillary Clinton is looking worse and worse because now China has her emails, what does CNN do? They have so clearly taken a side and they can’t really abandon their side. People don’t really do that. So if they don’t abandon their side, what do they do? They dig in and they get a little bit crazier.
Antifa and Racial Narratives
When I look at this, the Jeffrey Toobin thing where he’s accusing the President of essentially being a racist for being against Antifa—which is literally trying to destroy the country—by the way, is that too strong a statement? Is it too strong a statement to say Antifa is trying to destroy the country? I don’t know. I feel like that’s not hyperbole, right? Isn’t that actually their stated objective, to get rid of borders and to have anarchy? That is destroying the country.
So you’ve got Jeffrey Toobin taking the side of people who are expressly trying to destroy the country and also calling them the wrong ethnicity so that he can blame the President for being a racist. He throws in some other examples, but here’s what Jeffrey Toobin left out: he said it’s just more of the same where he insults black people like LeBron James and Don Lemon. I’m thinking, didn’t President Trump just call Tiger Woods smart?
The Pattern of Trump’s Criticisms
If you’re looking for a pattern, it looks like this: if you’re black and you like the President, you’re smart, according to the President. If you’re black and you criticize the President, you’re dumb. I’m pretty sure that’s the pattern here, don’t you? Isn’t the pattern that he’s good to people who like him and he goes hard at his critics?
Jeffrey Toobin, how could you miss this pattern? If a bunch of white hockey players started kneeling for the national anthem—and maybe they are, I don’t know—do you think the President would say, “Hey, you hockey… oh wait, sorry, I didn’t realize you’re all white. Since you’re white, go ahead and disrespect the flag that I’ve spent my life respecting and represent as President of the United States. Oh, hockey players, go ahead, knock yourself out. I didn’t realize you were white.” Does somebody think that the President is saying that?
Let’s test it. I’d like to see a hockey team kneel and then let’s see what the President says. How about having a famous white athlete criticize the President in public just as a test? I don’t know who we could get. Can anybody suggest a famous white athlete to criticize the President just as a test? And the test would be: does the President say, “Well, sorry, I didn’t realize you were white, free pass, you can criticize me all you want”? I don’t think that would happen, do you? How could you be so dumb, Jeffrey Toobin, that you can’t see the pattern? If you like the President, he likes you back. If you don’t like the President and you say so, he gives it back to you. You might even get a nickname. How could you not see that pattern? It’s mind-boggling.
Steve Kerr is somebody who has criticized the President. I don’t know if he’s risen to the level of being noticed. I don’t know if anybody’s asked the President about Steve Kerr. I will tell you that it makes me want to watch the Golden State Warriors less because of that. I got to admit, when basketball crosses over into politics, it makes basketball a lot less interesting.
Race vs. Politics in Media Coverage
What did he say about Kathy Griffin? By the way, did you see Kathy Griffin’s response to Milo Yiannopoulos? She tweeted a picture of her mansion. You had to see it in context, but it was very funny.
Steve Kerr and Popovich have the same thing going on, which is they’re team leaders and they’re backing their team. They are backing their team, so that’s a little less of a clear example. “Punchy” De Niro? Yeah, how about McCain himself? There was somebody that the President didn’t treat so well. Imagine if McCain had been African American. Imagine if the President had given as tepid a response to the death of a hero who was an African American as he did with McCain. What would people be saying? They’d be saying, “Well, it’s obviously because he’s black,” even though we’re watching him do it to somebody who was extremely white.
Anyway, watching CNN stir up racial problems is disturbing. There’s not much else going on except I think the GDP got revised up to 4.2. The Chinese hack of Hillary’s emails makes the President look good, even though nobody wishes that China had those emails. But you have to ask yourself: would Hillary Clinton be beholden to China if they had all her emails? Would they have any advantage over her? I’m not sure that they would. It could be just stuff like yoga in her email, so you never know.
The Lanny Davis thing—I haven’t gone hard at Lanny Davis in terms of criticizing him because he’s an advocate. Lanny Davis is not pretending to be even-handed. When someone who is being paid to be a proponent comes on TV and acts like a proponent, I’m not the one who’s going to say, “Hey, your facts are all wrong” or “You’re being absurd,” because that’s sort of what he is.
Iran’s Internal Conflict
Is Rouhani being… is that true? Sorry, I have to check that to see if there’s something about Rouhani. Iran’s Parliament gives the President a rare rebuke. This is about Iran. Iran’s Parliament summoned Rouhani to answer questions on Tuesday about the country’s economic crisis and then voted to reject his explanation. In a remarkable rebuke of a sitting leader, Rouhani blamed the United States.
Wow, they were not convinced by four of his answers. That doesn’t make sense. Rouhani is the moderate, he’s blaming the United States, and his own government—the Parliament—rejected him blaming the United States. There’s something I need to understand about this that I don’t, because people are on the “wrong” sides of this. I’ll have to look into that.
Trade Deals and North Korea
Yeah, he called Mika Brzezinski “dumb as a rock,” so the President has certainly insulted some white people.
Thoughts on trade deals affecting North Korea? Well, we have to wait for the dominoes to fall. Apparently, Canada is getting serious about negotiating now that Mexico may have made a deal. By the way, it only took 24 hours for me to see the first story of all the people who say the Mexico deal is actually bad for the United States. You’ve seen those experts saying, “Sure you have a deal with Mexico, but it’s a bad deal.” You knew that was coming. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good deal or a bad deal; you knew somebody was going to say it’s a bad deal.
Social Media Bias and Transparency
There are some conservative employees that work at Facebook who are pushing back about their internal process. You’re seeing this everywhere now. You’re seeing information about Google searches. When the President decides to make something news, he really makes something news, and it does look like the major tech companies are going to have to make some changes.
There’s a big question that I have about all of these social media companies: I don’t know the argument for why users can’t see the things they want to see when they explicitly want to follow somebody and explicitly want to see their content. I don’t understand why you just can’t let them see it. There’s something very fundamental about what’s going on that I don’t understand. Is there any explanation except corporate censorship? Is there any explanation why they won’t let you see what you want to see from the people you want to see it from? I understand that some of it would be fake, and I would be totally okay with better labeling.
A Solution for Content Filtering
I’m going to state my idea again and let’s see if you like it. Let’s just use Twitter as the model, and I’m just going to put this forward as an “ignorant suggestion”—ignorant on my part because I don’t know why this doesn’t work. Why can’t you let people see anything they want, but maybe color-code stuff that comes in the feed? So if something comes in and it’s a certain color, you know that it came from a source that at least Twitter’s checkers don’t think is credible.
Now, you might look at it and say, “I don’t agree with them,” and maybe you could uncheck it and say, “I do believe in it.” Or you could hit the filter and turn off all the ones coming in the shaded color because that color represents low credibility. Or you could turn it back on just to see which things you would have been missing.
I haven’t heard the explanation of why that wouldn’t be a good idea, because people would still be informed that their content is sketchy, but then they could see it. Logic-checking this: what would reduce fake news faster? Not seeing it at all—even if you can see it in other places but not on your Twitter feed—or seeing it labeled as fake news, where you could even click on it and find out who labeled it and why? I’d rather see the stuff that is fake labeled fake so I can see what it is and say, “Oh, it’s labeled fake, I wonder why.” Then I click and see this group has X credibility, they say it’s fake, and here are the reasons why.
Two Versions of Reality
Somebody says, “I don’t think people’s intentions are good.” Well, I think if you’re talking about every engineer working on the algorithm, I’m not talking about the leaders of the companies who have different motivations. I don’t assume anything pure about the motives of human beings, but I think transparency generally gets you a better result.
How about a “Movie One” or “Movie Two” news filter? I was thinking about that myself. There are two versions of reality, and each side believes that the other side’s reality is fake news. It’s more funny than useful, but you could actually have a Movie One and a Movie Two filter so you just want to see things that the people on the right think are real or the people on the left think are real.
If Trump says the sky is red, his supporters would say, “Yes, it is.” You just described everybody and their supporters. If CNN tells you something is real, you’re going to believe that too, even if it isn’t. So it is not something unique. People on the left like to think there’s something unique about people on the right—that they’re more likely to believe something ridiculous. I’m here to tell you that believing things that are ridiculous is a quality of being a human. It doesn’t have to do with your politics. If there’s one way to know if somebody is wrong, it’s when they say, “Everything on my side is right and everything on your side is an illusion.” You could be pretty sure that’s wrong because the illusions are certainly diversified.
Camerota’s Sununu Interview
It feels like the entire page of CNN is stuff that isn’t real news; it’s stuff they’re trying to turn into news. If you didn’t see the Sununu interview with Alisyn Camerota on CNN, you have to see that. She’s trying to create news by getting him to say something about the controversy of Trump versus McCain, and he’s just saying, “I’m just here to say good things about McCain and honor his service.”
It got really tense because she really wanted to create some news, and Sununu wasn’t the right person for that. First of all, he’s not Trump and he’s not McCain. Her opinion of what they think of each other—I don’t know how that’s news, but you could turn it into the news just by getting him to say something provocative. I’m sure she would have wanted him to disagree with the President because that creates a headline, and he wasn’t buying it.
By the way, I think Sununu has an insanely high IQ. I saw that a long time ago. He just wasn’t falling into the trap. It was somewhat hilarious to watch. He did insult CNN; that part was awkward. Even I would not insult CNN while I’m on CNN. I’m a pretty big fan of transparency, but I wouldn’t insult a network that was nice enough to have me on for an interview.
Regulating Social Media as a Utility
What if social media is regulated like a utility? I used to work for the phone company, which was regulated like a utility, and I got to tell you, I was close enough to the group that had to deal with the public utility commission that you hear some terrible things about regulators. The people who become the regulators are not always the most capable people, and they’re not always free of their own biases. You don’t want some kind of regulation that looks exactly like the regulation of public utilities.
That said, there might be some kind of public oversight—a third-party opinion feedback. It’s called “regulatory capture.” Over time, the regulators become captive of the industry because the industry has lots of money and they can flatter them and do things for their projects. So the regulators become corrupt over time, or that’s the risk anyway. The government might need to be involved, but we don’t know what that would look like or if it would actually work.
Closing Thoughts and Q
Am I blacklisted on CNN yet? Well, they haven’t invited me on in a long time, but I don’t know if that’s because I don’t have a new book to talk about yet.
I haven’t heard from Q in a while. Let me ask you this: do you think Q is the same as it was? Do you think something’s changed with Q? Dropped like crazy yesterday? “Q is the same”? All right, we’ll see what happens with Q.
All right, I’m going to take off. I don’t have enough to say today. I’m just wasting your time. Bye for now.