Episode 1009 Scott Adams: The Antifa Virus That Makes its Host Economically Unviable

Date: 2020-05-31 | Duration: 43:39

Topics

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Rough Transcript

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Transcript

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• The Antifa virus

• Excellent @JackMurphyLive Periscope coverage of DC riots

• A televised sporting event…riot coverage and videos

If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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[0:13]

hey everybody come on in here well do we have some stuff to talk about have you ever noticed that a lot of the news gets packed into some days there are some days when it's just so much news you can barely stand it well today is one of those days
i'm guessing that a lot of you did what i did last night which is binge on all the uh coverage of the riots and we're going to talk about that yes we will but first we're going to do a little thing called the simultaneous sip and if you've never experienced it boy are you lucky it's your lucky day this will be your first one and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass attacker challenge to stein a canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better including the damn pandemic and the riots

[1:14]

pandemic and the riots it's called the simultaneous if it happens now go
i can feel the violence decreasing with every sip
so raise your hand how many of you remember the coronavirus let me refresh your memory it was a virus uh that we believe started in china killed a hundred thousand americans uh but that was that was in uh 2020. oh wait it is 2020. what happened to the coronavirus wasn't that a big thing like not too long ago well it turns out the coronavirus is apparently nothing we're worrying about today but we are worrying about a different virus an idea virus which is

[2:15]

an idea virus which is what the antifa folks are spreading now i would argue that ideas if they're damaging ideas operate so much the same as a physical virus that you have to at least consider the same mechanisms for treating it so in other words if if you get the coronavirus what should i do
do well what i do if you get the coronavirus is i stay away from you so the most important thing that can protect me from your virus is information if i have information i can oh okay you've got the virus all right i'll stay over here for a while
but what about antifa antifa is sort of like a virus in the sense that if if an antifa person spreads their uh let's say their philosophy is that

[3:16]

uh let's say their philosophy is that what it is philosophy that would that would destroy the economics of any host that was exposed to it so right now you saw that these small businesses many of them owned by black citizens were destroyed last night at least in part you know antifa wasn't the only one there there were lots of bad actors but antifa was certainly part of destroying the economics of any host it enters now it's trying to destroy the economics of the united states and by the way they say that i'm not making that up that's actually the explicit intention is to destroy the economy of the united states now how do you deal with a regular virus you quarantine it you get as much information as you can you contact trace you quarantine it so identifying it and having information is
is is really the primary thing that you can use to fight a virus i would suggest that we should at least consider

[4:17]

consider a national registry for antifa now the registry doesn't have to be a government thing because i don't think it's illegal to start your own database and
and and have people contribute to it now you would of course have a problem that people would put wrong information in it so that would be a problem but if you require that people let's say demonstrate that there's some certainty that the person has antifa they would have to include let's say a social media snippet or something like that so if somebody let's say somebody put my name on there it would only take a minute for somebody to say all right let's see your evidence that this cartoonist is a member of antifa and you click on it and there are no social media links that would support that so you'd say okay that one that's not real but if somebody has social media posts that say they're anti-fog or there's a photograph of them at a anti-far event or something and you post

[5:18]

anti-far event or something and you post it
it wouldn't you say that's reasonably good evidence now i would think people just like a credit report people should be able to petition to have their name taken off if they're not antifa in fact maybe all it would take is a statement that says no this is incorrect you know i disavow antifa that would be fair but the question is social scoring
so here's the thing why is it that we citizens who are basically we could be infected by antifa either by their violence by their destruction physical destruction of our businesses or
or by the you know the the idea of getting our heads and maybe turning us into entity for ourselves why is it that if our government our government can't stop them obviously uh so if the government can't act against

[6:18]

so if the government can't act against anti-far what would stop these citizens from just saying all right it's nothing personal but we have to quarantine you because it's an idea virus and i would ask the following question antifa has a an idea of how they'd like to see the future is there any reason we can't give them that future so long as we keep them away from the people who don't want that future because i don't think antifa cares about other people minding their own business they only the antifa seems to be concerned about living within a system that's not the system they want to live in
in can't we fix that can't we find some territory in the united states it wouldn't have to be gigantic because you could test it small you get a few square miles and you take anybody who's an antifa you say
say how would you like to live here you could just have whatever rules you want

[7:20]

could just have whatever rules you want it could be very egalitarian it could be a socialism it could be communism it could be it could be chaos it could be
be a complete anarchy it could be whatever you want but just just keep your philosophy with you
you and just don't bother us i don't see why we can't give them what they want i mean literally create antifa land and just say look anybody who wants to live here and wants to live here without a government and without economics is welcome to do it and we should just run a little parallel experiment and then whenever anybody gets you know arrested let's say for anti-fa activities we could give them a choice go to jail or go live forever in antifa land or you know five years in anti-fall land whatever the whatever the sentence is because i got a

[8:21]

whatever the sentence is because i got a feeling that going to jail
versus living in antifa land the land that antifa would define as the way they want the world to work i've got a feeling they would look pretty similar to the person who was there you neither you know but in jail you're not going to starve to death that being the big difference
did you notice last night that the worst way to get the news was from the news and and i think there's an actual reason for that because a lot of the good news uh not good wasn't good but a lot of the let's say the closest to the action most accurate reporting was coming from individuals with their phones so if you looked at the reporting of the professional news crews they they would generally travel with enough people you could tell it was a news crew

[9:21]

news crew i assume they've got some kind of a cameraman with a proper camera they've probably got press credentials everybody knows of the press but the problem with being a member of the credentialed press is that the police recognize them too and you could when you're watching the coverage all you would see is the police telling the credentialed press to get farther back from the action so every time i turned on cnn cnn reporter was being pushed back from the police until they couldn't see anything but i was just on twitter last night and i came across jack murphy's
periscope feed so jack murphy if you're not following him you should just just do a search for jack murphy and he was in the middle of the action and i think the difference is that he could simply look like an individual who was attending the protest so he had a mask on and he just fit in

[10:22]

so he had a mask on and he just fit in with everybody else he had a phone but lots of people had phones i assume he i don't know for sure but i think he probably had some maybe ear buds or earbuds or something and that was his microphone slash um you know when the way he was talking to the periscope but if you didn't see him live in the middle of the riots when the fires were starting you really missed a show because so i put in my own my own earphones so i could i could hear the action in stereo just like i was on the street and then i'm looking through jack's camera you know his viewfinder and man you were you were there and you could hear his breathing uh and his
his you know his level of let's say what's the right word level of legitimate concern for his safety as well as for his city and there was a real drama because there was a smallish

[11:22]

real drama because there was a smallish fire that got set against some construction platform stuff against a building that if the fire had continued it would have taken out the whole building and given the state of things i don't know if fire crews could have even gotten there and
and you know there was a lot of other places the fire crews were needed i feel like the whole block would have burned down so you're watching um yeah so it's at jack murphy live if you're looking for his uh twitter feed so thousands of us i think at one point there were like i don't know 3.5 000 of us were watching live as jack was in the middle of the action way closer to the action than any of the professional news crews and you're actually you were afraid for his safety and you were watching a building maybe go up in flames which could have been you know how many tens of millions of of loss probably people die if you get that much fire going and it was you were really there

[12:26]

and it was you were really there i mean i could not leave the feed because he put me right in the middle of the riot and i i could feel it i could feel it viscerally it was it really it was an incredible moment in understanding that the traditional press has some some built-in limitations that i don't know if they can overcome you know maybe they'll find a way to adjust but watching watching jack get into the middle of the story and then watching the professional news crews that were kept by the police so far outside the story that it wasn't it wasn't worth watching really it was nothing to see a big difference there might have been something important happening in terms of how we get the news and understand the news i remember there was a quote i heard it was a long time ago it was years ago now
now uh it was from mark cuban and i don't know it might have been five years ago or something and he said a quote that i thought was crazy at the

[13:28]

a quote that i thought was crazy at the time but now it's completely true i think he was just ahead of his time and he said that if there's a big breaking news story he doesn't check the news he checks twitter because twitter is going to be faster and and hit it from more angles and you're going to you know quickly get it and there's no commercials and there's no you know the opinion is easier to sort through and i remember at the time i thought well that's not true because i was using twitter i didn't have many followers and i wasn't really being exposed to the stories the way i have now but once you have a big account as i do people start tagging you in stories if they want you to boost boost the signal so suddenly this morning i just opened up my twitter and i've got just the highest quality of videos and stuff you know a lot of it from andy know and i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing his name right ngo how do you pronounce that um but anyway

[14:30]

how do you pronounce that um but anyway andy's got tons of videos so you know i follow him and so i'm seeing i'm seeing raw you know on the ground footage of people being beaten and just horrible stuff but i didn't see very much of that on the regular news because i don't know if the regular news is censoring that stuff because it's a little bit too too rough or there or they just don't have it i don't know so watching the difference of the quality of the news from from citizens just doing their thing world of difference it's not even close it's not even close the quality of the reporting from the citizens it's just way better than the pros and there's a reason for it
so let's uh let's call the winners and losers last night so the biggest losers were the african-american community because they took an advantage that was

[15:30]

because they took an advantage that was really a gigantic opening i mean yesterday or this week i'd say based on the the george lloyd video we saw this incredible opportunity where people on the far right and the far left all had exactly the same opinion for the first time which is all right you know the people on the right who might have been a little resistant to the concept that police were you know at least in some occasions were being a little uh not a little but in some occasions they were crossing the line and i think even people on the right who sort of intellectually understood that was probably the case there's always a bad apple in the bunch but
but seeing it i'm sorry floyd i always i i'm being corrected in the comments george floyd not lloyd uh i confuse the trouble is george floyd

[16:31]

i confuse the trouble is george floyd has two first names and lloyd is a first name and i'm just there's just too many first names to keep keep track of um but anyway i would say that the the big losers were the
the black community because they had such a gigantic opening where the entire pretty much close to 100
100 of the white community and other communities saw the same thing they did on that video of george floyd and we're on the same side completely on the same side in that moment if anyone had come up anybody prominent had come up with some actual suggestions of let's do this to make it better or let's make this specific change the whole country was ready congress left right democrats republicans just give us just give us a real suggestion we're all ready everybody wanted to help

[17:33]

we're all ready everybody wanted to help all on the same side and then antifa got involved and then black lives matter made the strategic error of all strategic errors in fact historians may consider black lives matter's strategy in this as to be maybe one of the worst activist strategies of all time unfortunately because you know they have they have a legitimate issue and i think they they had the they deserved a legitimate response they deserved a legitimate protest and while there were many people with good intentions there were too many people with the wrong intentions and really ruined the whole thing now as i've told you hey the dragon is docked somebody says forget everything we're talking about elon musk had just docked his

[18:35]

elon musk had just docked his his rocket and nasa of course we don't want to leave out nasa they're they're a big part of the process obviously but hey elon musk's rocket just docked according to the comments well that just makes my whole day better i gotta say anyway my point being that we are visual creatures and because we're visual creatures if you put up one visual and then one concept that takes some words the concept that takes some words loses to the visual so all last night we were treated to the visual of african americans mostly mostly looting stores beating up white people who we don't know what caused any of these fights but you know we see the the outcomes so i'd say the african american community uh lost last night maybe more than i've ever seen them lose in any one day in terms

[19:37]

seen them lose in any one day in terms of reputation and empathy now if you're trying to make things better for your community the thing you need to do is not convince your own community it's not really about talking your own people into something because you're already there the whole point of activism is to convince other people you want to change other people's minds that's the whole point
yeah i i i can't switch switch modes to watch it doc but uh we'll watch it uh later and uh so my point is uh my point is that because the visuals were so overwhelmingly negative for the black community that i think african americans lost just a tremendous amount last night just a tremendous amount and i'm not even talking economically economically a lot

[20:37]

talking economically economically a lot of them lost their businesses lost their jobs you know it was pretty bad economically if any of them were the store owners or work at those stores and one assumes that it had to affect a lot of people but it's really hard to wake up today if you were if you were let's say emotionally on the side of the african-american community let's say you were not in that community but you were emotionally with them you're emotionally on their side and you're you're like yeah you know i saw that video too tell me what you need us to do i'll help you
you just tell us how to change something give us a suggestion we'll help you and that's all that's all gone now that was all squandered so i don't want to make the mistake that pretty much everybody's going to be making from all day long when they talk about this the common dumb way to look at any of this

[21:38]

this is that the two percent bad people in any of these groups that we're talking about whether it's the two percent bad police or the two percent bad black lives matter people if if any of the bad people were in black lives matter they might have just been along for the ride yeah and then antifa of course is is more thoroughly bad that's not a two percent situation because they that's by choice that they they they choose a philosophy so you can't say that only two percent of them are bad they've they bought into a bad philosophy all of them so i think it was a devastatingly bad night for the black community they've lost any goodwill that they might have generated lost the biggest opportunity in black i'd say the biggest opportunity in black history that is um let's say more modern so obviously i'm not talking about civil rights or going back that far but i'd say in the last

[22:39]

i'd say in the last 10 years perhaps the biggest opening for the black community to have a real like real game just squandered last night completely lost completely lost which is the gigantic tragedy so basically the the georgia floyd tragedy became worse instead of becoming the trigger that fixed everything and it could have gone that way easily so antifa i think has to take some of the blame i understand that there are some smart people uh including marco rubio who are suggesting foreign adversaries might have something to do with this now in my opinion if foreign adversaries do not have anything to do with this i would lose all respect for our foreign adversaries because this would be kind of an easy one right if you're a foreign adversary and you

[23:39]

if you're a foreign adversary and you want to cause a little trouble in the united states and you know they do this would be sort of a gimme so if they're not if our foreign adversaries are not trying to take advantage of this well then they're certainly missing an easy play so one assumes that there's some of that but the ridiculousness of blaming any of this on uh white nationalists is is almost laughable almost
so jake tapper was interviewing national security adviser robert o'brien that might have been this morning and robert o'brien was saying that the riots were driven by antifa as opposed to any other group that's you know being mentioned and the weird thing about this is that jake tapper even this week was spreading the fine people hoax so is there some amazing lack of awareness

[24:40]

awareness that cnn is really the ones i mean largely cnn is driving the riots as much as anything imagine if you will a world in which the news was just legitimate news just legitimate but at the same time we got this video of george floyd being killed on video would you feel the same if you hadn't been told by the news you know that the your understanding of the world had not been framed by the news would you feel the same about it and the answer is it would still be exactly as bad as it is you know the video is the video but i don't know if people would have connected it to the larger issues in society so much as they might have said well that's you know a tragic situation that involves these people and we need to look into it but it's probably more about these people all right um

[25:43]

all right um did you have the feeling last night as you were watching all the televised um rioting and stuff in the protesting did you have the feeling that you were watching a televised sporting event or maybe the beginning of the invention of a televised sporting event and not in a good way like i'm not even joking about this if this sounds like i'm making a joke that's not where i'm heading i'm heading i'm heading in the direction of when i watch this i found myself in spectator mode like i was watching it like entertainment and i wanted to try to talk myself out of it as it was happening and i'd say no no scott this is not entertainment this is the opposite of entertainment this is just one tragedy after another you know one injury one bad thing happened to somebody a story getting looted

[26:44]

story getting looted is really just one horrible thing after another that's what i'm watching but the way it was produced you know the way the news coverage handles it there was something about the production quality of it something about the fact that the teams had uniforms and the police had uniforms auntie anti-fog uniforms black lives matter quite often had you know black lives matter shirts on and stuff uniforms so you had uniformed players on teams there were rules of sorts there were rules and weirdly uh people seemed to follow the rules you know the police had their rules antifa has a certain set of weapons and tactics and they stayed within that for example nobody in antifa pulled a gun
gun right it's a country where pretty much anybody can get a gun if they don't have a criminal record i guess and all of these antifa people there probably most of them are anti-gun but nobody pulled a gun

[27:47]

anti-gun but nobody pulled a gun at antifa now that suggests that they have a set of rules which is okay sticks and kicking and lighting things on fire those are within the rules but we don't use guns so in a sense they were uniformed teams uh the the goal of each of them seemed to be um real estate like football in football you're trying to control territory and the police were trying to control territory while the protesters were trying to control territory for the protesters scoring meant destroying a business or setting something on fire or you know or being senseless some some victim and i i couldn't get past the fact that there's something about the fact that we don't have major televised sporting events and then the way it was produced it just felt like a sporting event

[28:49]

it just felt like a sporting event right i'm not the only person who felt this right and again i it's possible to to have complicated and conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time it's what makes us human right so you can you can hold two thoughts that conflict with each other in your head so you can be watching it and saying this is the most horrible thing i hope it stops right away there's nothing good about it and you can still have in your head it's really entertaining you're like in a sick terrible way so i was having that experience last night i wondered if anybody else did
that's the main things i wanted to talk about it looks like if i had to predict where this is going i would say that like most viruses it will burn out

[29:50]

i feel as though the the idea of protesting on the streets for racial equality has been shown to be ineffective
let's see if we learned anything from this now we did learn that a video along with lots of social media pressure is really really effective did we not wouldn't you agree that we have learned that social media plus a plus a damning piece of video plus punditry plus politics and everything that could work really well in terms of a cause what we also learned is that if black lives matter has a street protest it will invite both looters who just want to be sort of hidden in the the crowd so they don't get in trouble for looting and it will also attract antifa who is there for different reasons now they might say we're also here because of racism

[30:51]

because of racism but really they're there to destroy civilization that's sort of their deal so i think black lives matter should have taken away from this that street protests will always attract those two elements which will then attract the police which then makes the black lives matter people all the more worked up because their whole thing they're protesting against is aggressive police action and there are the police acting aggressively because these other groups that are not black lives matter necessarily have attracted police action so um yeah so i think that what black lives matter should have learned from this is to stay off the streets because that's an old-school way of protesting that because of this unique situation with antifa and because looting is now considered just an automatic part of any street protest

[31:51]

protest at least of that nature i don't think street protests make any sense anymore so if you're in black lives matter let me put it as starkly as i can if you're an organizer of black lives matter and after watching this latest experience and you still bring your people onto the streets tomorrow or tonight let's say let's say today or tonight if you still bring people onto the street organized it's one thing if it's spontaneous that people just do what they do but if the organizers of black lives matter organize people to protest on the street tonight after learning what we learned then black lives matter i think has to be
be completely disavowed because there's no way that that level of stupidity can be rewarded and you can't claim that they don't know all right if they do it again tonight nobody can claim they didn't know what

[32:51]

nobody can claim they didn't know what was going to happen now here's the other here's the other strange thing about this we are a country with approximately 50 trillion uh personal firearms
we are a country with approximately 50 trillion personal firearms give or take you know a trillion or two that's just my estimate so we have a lot of guns did any civilian pull a gun on anybody other than i saw i saw one story of a shopkeeper who killed who killed somebody but of all those riots in a country that's just full of guns where were all the guns i'm not suggesting that they should be there that's not what i'm suggesting at all
all but wasn't there something unusual about the lack of guns

[33:52]

about the lack of guns um that and i'm wondering about that because how long does the lack of guns last because i would think that every store owner who watched their entire livelihood be destroyed probably said to themselves i think i'm going to get some extra guns
there's a cnn news scoop as somebody says
yes and the the police were using these paintball guns uh which i thought was actually fairly creative because if you get hit with a paintball gun you definitely it definitely stings uh 400 million guns somebody says 300 million guns yeah did i miss it by a little 300 million not 50 trillion all right i will accept i'll accept your revised uh yeah what was up with bow and arrow

[34:53]

uh yeah what was up with bow and arrow man i've seen that reference was that was that a reference from last night or was there a different bow and arrow man a cop got shot
antifa shot up an oakland police station and killed the police officer well i guess what i'm asking is why the why the good guys didn't have guns so um it's one thing that the protesters had a few guns that's bad enough but there were no second amendment people there in any of them i think it has to do with the fact that it's urban now the other thing that we may have learned from all this is that urban life doesn't work i think we've learned that if you want to be susceptible to terrorism or coronavirus or rioting or any of these things having your shop destroyed just because you happen you just exist i feel as though if you

[35:54]

you just exist i feel as though if you had
had traffic and pollution and everything else to it that city living may be maybe it's something that we just can't tolerate anymore maybe it's just not a way that humans should live maybe they shouldn't live all crowded up like that that could be part of the problem all right
so in 2004 a college girl was killed with a with a paintball gun is that true
uh yeah some celebrities are paying to bail out protesters i wonder how embarrassing that is today but i also wonder if people on the left are seeing the same videos that you and i are seeing because if i look at my video feed it's just full of videos of people being beaten to death or near death by protesters if if you're on the left are you seeing

[36:55]

if if you're on the left are you seeing those videos or are you just seeing the video of george floyd and that's motivating you know you bailing people out of jail
the somebody says the second amendment team was not on the field i think that's the whole story right correct me if i'm wrong but all of the legal gun owners i'll bet you there were no shootings by legal gun owners last night how about that for a story you know i always talk about the dog that doesn't bark how about this for a dog that didn't bark 300 million guns in this country how many how many of the 300 million do you think are legally owned would you say 200 million are legally owned i don't even know how to estimate that but let's say there are
200 million legally owned guns in the united states

[37:56]

united states and we had rioting in all of our major cities and here's the question was there was there even one unjustified shooting by a legal gun owner even one was there even one legal gun owner involved in a bad shooting and all of this action last night i don't know i haven't heard of one now the shop owner who took out somebody i don't know if that was a legal handgun but i would call that i'm not sure i would call that an illegitimate use of the firearms because he took out somebody who was taking out his life basically so while i do not condone murder or vigilantism i do not condone them it is also true if i watched a shop owner kill a protester if i had watched it with my own eyes a shop owner killing a protester to protect his life and his family's

[38:58]

to protect his life and his family's economic situation because the shop is going to be destroyed and you know let's say they don't all have insurance if i saw that i'd be okay with it i'd be okay with it i don't condone it and i you know i certainly don't encourage it but if a shop owner killed a protester to protect his shop i you if you put me on that jury i can tell you which way it's going to go right i don't even need to know the details of what happened if if the fact is a shop owner killed somebody in the act of destroying their shop you put me on the jury i'm not even going to listen to the evidence that's it i'm not even gonna listen i i will decide before the evidence every single time because i'm gonna side with the shop owner doesn't matter doesn't matter the color of the shop owner or the color of the attacker irrelevant if somebody's if somebody is just

[40:00]

if somebody's if somebody is just threatening somebody's entire livelihood their livelihood that's that's sort of your life right if you're a small business owner the small business you know it's not technically your life but it's sort of your life and if somebody's going to take that out just for fun just just because it's a fun riot and they want to break some windows want to ruin your business set it on fire and that shop owner ends up taking out a protester there's just no way in the world i could allow allow the rest of the jury to convict that guy so that at the very least it would be a hung jury but if i've taught you anything it's that if you put a hypnotist on a jury deliberation it's kind of going to go the way of the hypnotist right unless there are unless there are two hypnotists in the room if you put me in a room with 11 other citizens and just say all right work it out

[41:02]

and just say all right work it out it's going to go my way all right it'll either be a hung jury or it'll go my way um because that's how it works all right um somebody says no one will put you on a jury scott maybe not now but i have been on a number of juries so i've been a jury four men i've been on three maybe so even even though i've been recognizable as a you know semi b level celebrity for years uh even then i would get put on juries so they as long as you say you're willing to do the job it's pretty much all they need you just got to be willing to do the job and willing to say that you won't be biased uh so as a federal service officer that they killed in oakland so i don't know the details of that i'll probably find that on today

[42:03]

probably find that on today uh more killings last weekend in chicago yeah all right so that's my idea of the day is to start a registry for antifa i don't know how anybody can you know i asked the question on twitter and this is a serious question how do how does antifa eat like actually literally how did members of antifa get food and i'm not joking that's a serious question because they're anti-everything that produces economics and food so do they use those things do they have jobs do they have regular jobs because how can you be an antifa and have a job it feels like that doesn't make sense if you're trying to destroy the system that would include destroying jobs why not just start by not having one see how it works out for you so let me ask you this if you knew somebody if you knew an employer employed a

[43:04]

if you knew an employer employed a member of antifa would you use that company if you had an option in other words if if he knew one company hired at least one antifa person and he had a choice of buying from another company that no antifa employees who do you shop with so i think information is the cure for coronavirus but it's also the cure for antifa and i'll leave you on that and i will i'm gonna go watch the video of the dragon docking now you should too and i will talk to you later