Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-09-11
Introduction
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It’s called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you’ve never had a better time—although that doesn’t make sense today because I know you’re all in quite a funk. But we’ll work through it. We’ll work through it.
And if you’d like to get to the other side, even though it’s too soon—we should wallow in this a little bit more, I think that would be appropriate and respectful—but we’re still going to do the simultaneous sip. All you need for that is a cup or a mug, a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes, well, I hope it makes everything better. This one’s for Charlie Kirk. Respect.
September 11th Anniversary
Where do we begin? I guess we’ll begin with September 11th. Today is the 11th; it’s the anniversary, of course. And honestly, I don’t feel like talking about it. Everybody okay with that? September 11th is going to have to take a backseat today. We’re not forgetting it, but the recency bias is very strong. So the things that happened recently are always going to seem like the bigger things.
The Thin iPhone
While people are still streaming in, I’ll just say one other thing before we talk about Charlie. Apparently, Apple introduced the thinnest ever Apple iPhone. It’s got a little less battery life, so they had to give up a few things to make it thin. But I wonder if they still made it slippery and breakable. Because I can’t believe Apple used to make the slipperiest phone that was also very breakable, and you would always put a case on it. So I’m trying to imagine any scenario in which I would get their thinnest Apple iPhone ever and then I wouldn’t put a case on it. So it’s not going to be thin when I’m done with it; it’s going to have a big old clunky case. Anyway, enough of that.
The Death of Charlie Kirk
We all want to talk about Charlie Kirk. Let’s just do that. You know that 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk was tragically shot and killed at a Utah Valley University event where he would often do these little events where he would go in public and in front of a big crowd, he’d debate people. And as you know, a one shot rang out. They think from 200 yards away, and it took his life.
The suspect, unless something changed in the last few minutes, is still at large. The manhunt is ongoing. I did hear that they found a rifle. There was a rifle in the woods, approximately where they thought he might have gone through the woods. And allegedly—this is from Steven Crowder, he got some information on this—allegedly, there were three unspent rounds, I guess, that had carved on them some trans stuff and something about anti-fascism. So if we were to believe the bullets, it might be a trans shooter or somebody who is pro-trans and really, really cared about it. But we don’t know. So I would say that the reports about the gun and the reports about what’s written on the bullets—I wouldn’t fully believe any of that yet. So I would warn you, that’s still fog of war stuff. So the odds of both of those things being true, I don’t know. It’d be hard to put odds on it.
As many of you have said, and Greg Gutfeld said it yesterday, the name of Charlie’s organization was Turning Point. That was a hugely successful young people’s organization of conservative, politically active people. Hugely successful. And it was called Turning Point. And a lot of people noted that this feels like a turning point. But to what? And turn how? We’ll talk about that.
I also heard Greg say on The Five yesterday that Charlie had substantial power. The right kind. The persuasive “I did everything you need to do to get the right kind of attention” kind. That was a big power. And some would say, and I would say this, I don’t think Trump could have gotten elected, at least the second time, without his bringing the young people along. So how important was he? Really important. How much power did that represent? A lot of power. A lot, especially since he had sway over the younger generation. So it’s going to last a while.
But as Greg noted, Charlie’s energy is impossible to destroy. Because energy doesn’t get destroyed; it just moves. And that energy has to go somewhere. Because he was the keeper and controller of an immense amount of energy. Personal energy, but also political energy. And that can go somewhere. It doesn’t disappear. And there are a whole bunch of people in the public who feel like some of that energy entered them. I feel that way.
As soon as I saw the news, I thought what many of you thought, which is: what can I personally do? What can I do? I can’t help the wounded—too far away. Money isn’t exactly the solution for this one. What can you do?
So the only thing I could think of doing yesterday was I went live for the people who are my normal audience. And I just knew that you needed to not be alone. Because that’s what I needed. I figured you’d feel the same. You know, a lot of us live in this weird bubble where we don’t hang around co-workers or even family members sometimes who share our understanding and feelings about all things political. So we really, really needed to hang with each other for a little bit. It’s what we needed just to get it out of our system and talk about it. So I went live, and that was one little thing—very little thing—but it was one positive thing I could do. So I did it. If you can think of anything later that is a positive thing you can do, I’d encourage you to do it. Because right now, doing things is part of the recovery. You’ve just got to find a purpose. You’ve got to say, “All right, that was horrible, and it’s beyond words horrible. But I’m going to do something. I’m going to make something better. I’m going to change something.” And we’ll talk quite a bit about that.
Investigation Details
Well, other facts that are either interesting or should be known: the shooter was apparently on a roof, and Charlie Kirk apparently had his own private security. Now, my question is the same as yours. Nobody was looking at the roof? The most obvious place for a shooter, especially after the Butler event with Trump. Nobody was looking at the roof? It was just a clone of that same attempt on Trump.
And an event like that, are you telling me that the college didn’t have a drone that they would just sort of naturally check the rooftops? And that his security group, they also didn’t have a drone, or they weren’t allowed to run it for some reason? So we’ve got questions about the lack of drones, don’t we? Because if he was—if Charlie was worried enough that he had his own security—it seems like checking the roofs, at least visually… I mean, they could have seen it visually. The guy was in plain sight. So we’ll see.
A lot of people are saying that the hit looked like a professional job. I would say if the gun that was being found—in other words, if Crowder’s report is accurate, and we don’t know that yet—but if that really was the gun, the only way that could be a professional job is if they were trying to take you off the scent and try to frame somebody else. But that feels a little too clever. That doesn’t feel real. So the first thing we have to know before we speculate further on the motives or who did it would be: is that gun real? Because first of all, it didn’t seem like a modern—it was sort of an old gun with bolt action. Do you think that somebody who was planning to be a professional sniper would have had that gun? Now, I don’t know enough about that gun to know. Maybe it’s extra accurate or something. So somebody who knows about guns maybe can tell me. Is that a gun you would use if you were professional? And if you were professional, would you put any kind of message on the bullet? I don’t know.
So there are some things that don’t sound professional. But there are other things that do. The fact that he pulled it off—we assume it’s a “he”—the fact that he pulled it off, so it was well-planned, well-executed (no pun intended), and the shot was good. But those are not impossible things for an amateur to do. If I said to any one of you, “All right, here’s the deal. There’s going to be a shot from the roof, and you go to the gun range and you’re pretty well practiced. Do you think you could pull off this horrible event?” Probably you could. Maybe not every time, but only one time happened.
So according to John Solomon, the FBI has some hot leads, but it “includes a little bit of foreign intelligence.” Now, that doesn’t mean it’s a foreign-driven activity, but for some reason, some country that isn’t America might know something about it. We don’t know what that means. Maybe they only have information, but maybe it was something else.
Theoretical Motives
So among the possibilities, my first assumption was that the most likely reason for the shooting was it was a trans activist. Somebody born a man, maybe even went through the military, but is now living as a woman and decided—and may or may not be on some cocktail of drugs. So that would be the most obvious. But it also has the disadvantage in terms of a hypothesis that it’s a little too on the nose.
So the thought that it’s just an angry Democrat who has been convinced that all Republicans are Hitler? Maybe. But that feels—it’s not something we’ve seen before, right? Have we? It’s usually a crazy person. So it might be a Democrat who is crazy. But maybe trans, maybe angry Democrat. Not ready to say that it’s either one of those yet.
But I’m going to throw in some other theories that I’m not sure if I’ll say on social media because that’s a little bit too much interest. So if you don’t mind, don’t clip this. Let’s keep this to this audience. There are things you can say to a specific audience that maybe shouldn’t go bigger. So as a favor, don’t clip this.
And here’s what I wanted to add to the possibilities. If you were Iran and you wanted revenge on Trump, how would you do it? Well, he’s too well protected, and it would be too big of a problem if you tried to kill him. Although there were rumors that they had some kind of assassination teams. I don’t know that that was ever confirmed, but that was part of the news. And knowing that one of the things Trump did was took out your General—actually, you could argue he took out a lot of leaders if you imagine he was working with Israel—but at the very least, Trump took out Iran’s top General, Soleimani. Could it be that the Iranians said, “We can’t get to Trump, but we want to respond with something that’s in the same lines”? And Charlie Kirk looks a lot like a General. He looked like somebody who was loyal to Trump and was a professional who woke up every day trying to make the Trump world a better place. He seemed like a General. So one of the possibilities—I don’t think it’s a high possibility, but I’m just going to throw it in the mix—is that Iran did it as revenge on Trump. Because remember, Trump killed their General, not their leader. If they also killed one of Trump’s Generals just to send the message without confirming it—not claiming any credit—but it’s possible.
There’s another possibility that’s even more horrible. That it’s the cartels. Do you think the cartels would not want to be in a war with the United States because they can’t win a traditional war? But they may find it intolerable that their leaders are being rolled up and their boats are being shot out of the water. Maybe—and again, this would be low priority, or low possibility but not impossible—the cartels said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to make it really unpleasant to be Trump if he keeps doing this. And we can’t get to Trump, but we can get to other things he cares about.” Somebody like Maduro, maybe Venezuela, maybe the cartels. So again, I wouldn’t put a high likelihood on the cartels or Iran, but I wouldn’t rule it out. And I’m not sure how I would even rank that compared to angry, crazy Democrat who got off a lucky shot. So still lots of possibilities.
Suspicious Activity and Rumors
Some of the rumors that are attached to it probably will turn out to be nothing, but I’ll let you know what people are talking about. There were two people behind Charlie and behind the little tent that were part of the crowd. One of them looked like he was signaling something right before the shot. It looked like he touched his hat. Now, maybe he was just adjusting his hat, but it looked like it was a tip of the hat, and then the shot rang out. And then there was a guy next to him who seemed to be signaling something with his hands. Maybe, maybe not. And that also came right before the shot. So if I had to bet, I would bet they’re unrelated. Just somebody touched his hat and somebody did something we don’t understand. So probably not. And the reason I say that is they were standing directly behind Charlie. If you were going to signal something or you were part of the plot, the last thing you would do is stand in the place that would be most photographed, right behind him, and also close to where the bullets are going to be flying. So I don’t think they would be there doing that.
There’s also something about an airplane. So there are reports—and remember this is fog of war, so probably all this related stuff, probably all false. Probably every bit of it is false around context. But one of those things is that a private jet left only minutes after the shooting and they turned off their transponder. They turned off something to go invisible for about half an hour. And then it flew back, but then it was visible again, electronically visible. So people are saying is that how the shooter got away? Probably not. Probably—was it a transponder? They turned their transponder off, not the radar. I think that sounds right, yeah. The transponder, so they couldn’t be tracked for a while. So I don’t know what that’s about.
Media and Political Reactions
So Van Jones on CNN, I think it was one day before the shooting, he was claiming that Charlie Kirk—well, he was saying some things about Charlie Kirk. And he probably regrets that the timing of that was so close. But we’ll see where that goes. CNN has a lot more talking to do. We’ll listen to it.
Governor Pritzker of Illinois, he said, “Political violence unfortunately has ramped up in this country. I think there are people who are fomenting it in this country. I think the President’s rhetoric often foments it.” Now, Elizabeth Warren also laughed at the idea that it was anything except Trump fomenting the violence. To which I say: Are you kidding? Do you really believe that we think that Trump’s rhetoric is what’s fueling this? No. No. And do the other people who get worked up, can they blame Trump for getting them worked up? It doesn’t work that way. They are responsible for their own actions and words and feelings.
And MSNBC had to fire one of their on-air people. What was his name? I hate this guy so much I don’t want to remember his name. But I’ll give it to you just so we can embarrass him a little bit. Analyst Matthew Dowd. So his comment was, he suggested that you have to expect this sort of thing to happen when somebody like Charlie uses the rhetoric that he uses. Which people said: Are you serious? Are you blaming him for creating—are you justifying the murder based on the fact that he had a comment? Because he said things that people didn’t like? And he also said, same guy, unbelievable, that he said that they hadn’t yet ruled out the possibility that it was a Trump supporter celebrating by firing a gun. He actually said that. That it might have been a Trump supporter celebrating by firing a gun. At what? At a crowd of people and hitting the person who is in charge? Like just accidentally firing a gun? Un-freaking-believable. Yeah, that guy got fired. And MSNBC, I think, had to. They didn’t have any choice. The public was going crazy on that.
Now, as you know, MSNBC, CNN, a lot of the mainstream media has been for now what, 10 years, been calling Trump and his supporters Nazis and calling him the Führer, saying he wants to rewrite the Constitution and steal your democracy and become a dictator. Do you think that any of that creates some danger for a Charlie Kirk kind of a person? And the answer is yes. There’s a direct line. There is a direct line from the news and the way they cover it and the language that they allow on the air. That’s what causes this. It’s direct. If you didn’t have the news architecture that you have, this wouldn’t have happened.
And here’s the other thing: everybody knows. Every single person knew that this was going to happen. Every single person knew this was going to happen. Did we warn about it? I did. I did. I said in 2020, if Biden gets elected, that Republicans would be hunted. And it was because I saw a change in the way they talked. The change in the way they talked previewed a change in their behavior. And I could see it clearly. It’s sort of a hypnotist thing. And sure enough, how many Republicans have now been shot or destroyed? I won’t even count people like me who were canceled entirely by Democrats. There’s not a single Republican who ever canceled me. Not one. Not even one. But they didn’t kill me. So there’s that. I’ve got that going for me so far.
So let’s do the score. If you’re watching CNN or MSNBC, you have noticed that they’re trying to do a “both sides” treatment of this. As in, “Well, it’s not the Democrats who are violent because look at all these other examples where Republicans were violent or where a Democrat got killed.” So here’s the score, even though keeping score is vile. It’s part of the conversation now. So you should at least have the facts.
So we know that Steve Scalise got shot up during that baseball game. Charlie Kirk, of course. Trump was attempted assassination twice. And of course, the J6ers were rounded up, etc. So that’s a lot of hunting of Republicans. But as Jake Tapper and others like to point out, it’s not only Republicans who have been killed. In February of 2022, some mayoral candidate in Louisville was targeted. So shots were fired but no injuries. And later, yeah, I guess the guy who shot was convicted. All right, so that’s 2022, and it was not successful in terms of assassination. Then October 2022—oh, by the way, I asked Grok. So this is coming from Grok. And Grok says that Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was attacked by the crazy homeless guy with a hammer. And so they’re counting that as a Republican attack on Democrats, I guess. Well, that’s what Grok is putting on the list. Then there was that—this one’s more on point—Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania. There was a crazy guy who was an anti-Semite and tried to burn down his house and kill him, but his family was all safe. Then there’s a State Representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, in June of this year. She and her husband were shot and killed in their home by that guy who was impersonating a police officer. And apparently that was over abortion, so it was a political killing. There was a State Senator in Minnesota in June who was shot multiple times. And I think that was the same guy who shot the others. So we’ve got one guy who shot multiple people. So I don’t know if you count that as one or multiple. But the Josh Shapiro one is pretty on point. So if you’re wondering, does it only go one direction? Well, that one time it didn’t go one direction.
The Origins of Rhetoric
And then, so if you’re wondering where did all this happen? How did our rhetoric become the dangerous kind where people are willing to kill sometimes Democrats, sometimes Republicans? Well, according to Stephen Miller on X, you can draw a straight line from Obama’s presidency to today’s assassination. Stephen says he created the activist culture of getting in people’s faces, yelling at relatives, and literally demonizing political opposition. Charles Krauthammer pegged him from day one. And Stephen says, “May his political party suffer the consequences.” Do you buy that? Do you think that Obama’s the one who elevated the conversation to “you’ve got to get tough and get in their faces”? And did that cause a ripple effect which led to violence? Well, I don’t know. But I do know that Biden and Obama calling Trump a Nazi—which they both did in public multiple times—yeah, that’ll get you killed. That’ll get you killed. So if they don’t have some apologies for the years of risky behavior that guaranteed this situation—remember, they were part of the contributing factors—we’re going to hear that there might have been… oh, he had some apps.
Turning Point or Boiling Point?
Did you know that BLM still exists? Apparently they have a leader, somebody named Terry Wilson, who went through a Charlie Kirk vigil in front of the Capitol in Idaho and decided that a smart thing to do would be to go through the people mourning Charlie Kirk and yell “F Charlie Kirk” multiple times at supporters. You might not be surprised to hear that some fighting broke out. But the surprising part about this is I didn’t even know BLM still existed. Did you? Did you know BLM still had something like an organization? To which I say: Why? Why does that still exist? I can’t even believe it.
You may have seen a clip of TMZ when they were finding out that Charlie died. They were live. And at the same time that they found out that he was dead, there was a big cheer that went out from the staff from a back room. And Harvey Levin was talking, and you could see him looking uncomfortable when the laughter and cheering happened. Now, I assumed, as many did, that he’s going to need to have to explain that. I didn’t automatically assume that it was connected to Charlie Kirk’s death. But it looked like it, and the timing looked exactly like it. Well, today, TMZ and Harvey apologized and said that that wasn’t over Charlie Kirk, but that some of the staff was watching a car chase that was unfolding in real time on the other TV in the other room. And that what they were cheering for was something—maybe a successful capture of the guy or something. Now, I’m seeing in the comments: “They’re lying, they’re lying, they’re lying.” Maybe. Maybe they are. Because that would be the end of their business, wouldn’t it? If it really happened, that’s the end of their business. They’re out of business if that really happened.
Now, one possibility is that the staff lied to the boss to save their own asses. “Oh, no, we were looking at the television.” And probably they have TVs on all the time. But do you believe that at the height, right in the middle of the most tense part of watching the coverage about Charlie, when we didn’t know yet if he had a chance of making it, you think that they decided to go watch a car chase and that they were all excited about it and they’d completely forgotten about Charlie? I don’t know. So one possibility is that Harvey thinks or believes his staff because he wasn’t in the room when it happened. So I wouldn’t blame him for believing his staff. And I certainly would understand if they thought, “Oh, shoot, we better lie.” I don’t know if they did, but I would understand it if they did. I mean, that would be a normal human, weak thing to do.
However, I’ve got to give you some full disclosure. I’m not unbiased about TMZ. Some years ago, there was a little drama with me long before I got canceled. There was something else that looked like it was going to get me canceled. It was just something taken out of context. TMZ was the only publication that called me at home and said, “Is this true?” And it wasn’t true. And I told them it wasn’t true and they said, “Oh, okay.” And they did not run a story about it. They’re the only ones who fact-checked it. The only one. Everybody else—pieces of shit—they ran the story like it was true, and it wasn’t. They were the only ones who fact-checked it. Now, I’ve talked about the power of reciprocity. Unfortunately, because I’d like to be a little tougher on them, unfortunately, that little experience makes me biased in their favor. So I’m going to say, I personally—and this is just me—I’m going to accept Harvey’s explanation. I don’t know that it’s true. But I also don’t know that he knows it’s true. But if his staff told him it was true and he didn’t have a reason to doubt them in general, even if they lied, I’d still give him a little bit of a pass because they may be lying to him. But I absolutely understand if you think, “I don’t believe a word about that. They’re all lying and he knows it.” If you believe that, I respect that. I don’t know that you’re right, but I would respect your opinion because certainly there’s a suggestion that that might be the case. But Harvey, I personally am going to take your word for it. I think you’ve earned that. So for what it’s worth.
However, there were a lot of people in a lot of places that were literally cheering for the death. Now, if you say, “My God, they’re monsters,” you might be missing the larger context, which is half the country has been hypnotized into believing that he was a monster or serving a monster: Trump. So if you had heard that a monster—you know, somebody who could steal your democracy and ruin the country—if you heard that somebody you thought was that bad of a monster died, wouldn’t you cheer? When Bin Laden was killed, didn’t you cheer a little bit at all? When Soleimani, the Iranian General, got waxed by Trump, you didn’t feel a little bit happy? So obviously, Charlie is not analogous to Bin Laden or Soleimani. But Democrats think he is. Right? They think he is. So if the thing that bothers you is they celebrated, then you’re one level away from the real problem. The celebrating is a natural—you’d expect it, really—if they’d been told that Hitler is putting together his team and this is one of Hitler’s Generals. The problem is not the celebrating; the problem is that the public had been hypnotized by the mainstream media and the Democrats into believing it might be a good thing if people like him died. So I’m not really bothered by the celebrating. To me, that’s just a symptom of the fact that the horrible thing happened long ago. It happened long ago. It was the hypnotizing ordinary people into thinking that they’re living in Germany 1940 or 39 or whatever it is.
Moving Forward and Political Strategy
So a lot of you, as I said before, when this happened, you thought, “I need to do something. Everything’s changed.” Do you think everything’s changed? I’m worried that it probably hasn’t. Probably hasn’t. But I will speculate on a few things that might, that might be big and might change. And we’ll just run through that.
Number one, I saw a Mike Cernovich helpfully point out that this would be a good time for congressional hearings. Now, he said in a post on X, he goes, “Every billionaire funding far-left wing extremism—Soros, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman—massive RICO investigation now. Every dollar accounted for. Every pass-through group’s financial records public.” What do you think of that? Now, you might say, “Well, you know, why haven’t they done that anyway? You know, why don’t we know by now everything that’s happening in these NGOs?” We know a lot, and we know that they’re corrupt money-laundering organizations. But maybe even go bigger and just make all NGOs illegal unless they’ve gone through some specific kind of vetting process. Just make them all illegal. Not permanently. You know, you say, “All right, you could be legal, you could be legal, but you’re going to have to answer all these questions in writing—who’s in charge, and what did you do, and what did you do with the money?” You’d have to agree to be audited, stuff like that. So I’m 100% in favor of the government going way more aggressive on RICO investigations for this massive criminal enterprise called Democrats. Would it work? Well, remember the Democrats have really good lawyers and lots of them. So probably it would just get all tied up in the courts for a hundred years until Trump was out of office and it all went away. But it’s one thing we could do. It’s one thing we could do.
And I’ll tell you one thing that’s changed is risk tolerance. When one of your own—and by the way, I take this very personally. I didn’t know Charlie personally. My only fleeting connection was he once invited me on his podcast and I thought I was going to be dead in a few weeks so I didn’t return his message. So I never talked to him. But it’s still personal. This one’s personal. Because I consider myself a brother-in-arms, meaning that we were in the same war, in the same platoon. I just didn’t know him personally. So the fact that he got taken out, oh, that’s personal. That’s personal. And so when that happens, my personal risk profile gets adjusted. When I say, “Oh, you mean there’s a chance I’ll be shot?” All right, then RICO every one of these motherfuckers to the ground. I wouldn’t have wanted to, you know, destroy the country by going after the billionaires and really making it that overtly political. And it would be massive destruction. Now I’m all in. I’m all in for the massive destruction. Yep, it’s risky. Let’s do it. Because it’s something we can do. It’s not directly related to Charlie, but it changes my risk tolerance. And I’m all in now. I believe the Democrat Party has to be totally dismantled. I wouldn’t have said that two days ago. Two days ago, I would have said the healthiest thing for the country is that there are two strong political parties battling it out in a war of ideas. But you know who else thought that? Charlie fucking Kirk. He thought that we could talk it out. His whole model was based on polite debate and doing it in public so everybody could see it. That didn’t work. He got shot to death. So now we just need to destroy the entire Democrat Party. Legally, not illegally, not with guns, legally. But I am no longer content with the Democrat Party existing in its current form with its current supporters. It could be reconstituted into something honest, but at the moment, I think it needs to be ripped out by the roots. Now, that would be very bad for the country. It will make us, you know, at each other’s throats and it would be a bad idea if Republicans just had all the power forever and there was no risk that they would lose it. I’m not in favor of that—until now. Until now. Now I’m in favor of it. It would be a big risk, wouldn’t it? Okay. Okay. People would get killed if it got this tense. That’s very tragic. Do it anyway. We can no longer settle for the status quo. Whatever this big Democrat machine is—and again, it’s not like the leadership of the Democrats, you know, ordered the hit. I don’t think that happened. But I do think that they knew that they were creating a situation that was a mortal danger to Trump supporters. They’re trying to kill us indirectly by creating a situation in which somebody’s going to take the shot. And that’s what happened. It looks like it. It’s still possible there’s something about that shooter we don’t know and I might be wrong about everything. But even if I’m wrong about the motivation entirely, I’m not wrong that they’re still creating a situation that it would happen tomorrow because they haven’t stopped calling him Hitler. They’re blaming him for the shooting. It didn’t get better; it got worse. So yes, I’m with Mike Cernovich. We need to rip open this whole billionaire game, whatever’s going on there.
The second thing that I will commit to you is something I rarely, almost never do. But it’s time. And I’ve told you this before: one of the things that happens when you become a trained hypnotist is that if you have any sense of morality or ethics, you gate yourself. Meaning that I have too much persuasive ability and I literally keep it in a box because letting it out, it’s dangerous and it would take people’s—their illusion of free will, I guess. And it would give me more power than I should have in society. And one of the reasons, by the way, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this directly, but one of the reasons that I don’t do more of a professional show—obviously, I’m not putting any work into my background, I just put a light on my shelves, that’s it—is because if you get to the Charlie Kirk level of notoriety, you need security. You can’t even walk outside. That’s the way things are going. So I have always intentionally stayed below the level where somebody’d want to take a shot at me. But still big enough, enough people watching, that if I had a good idea or I was persuading something, people would notice. It would get to the right people. So what I often say is that for reasons of ethics and morality, I never turn on my power of persuasion to full force. I always hold back. I’m like 60-75%, something like that, because it just doesn’t feel right to erase somebody’s free will, basically. I changed my mind. I’m taking all the controls off. To destroy the Democrat Party. It needs to be driven into the sea. Now, not killing anybody, obviously. It doesn’t mean they’re all in jail, obviously. But their current leadership, they all have to go. And the way to make them go is to erase their political viability. And that doesn’t require anything physical. That requires good reframe. Maybe a reframe here or there. Might be a nickname. It might be just that we’re changing our focus a little bit. But I promise you, you may never see me do it. You may never see a sign of it whatsoever. Although some of it you will, because I’ll do a lot of it public. So you won’t know what I did, you won’t know who I talked to, you don’t know whose mind I might change. But is there a turning point? Probably. Probably. Won’t happen fast, but I’m all in.
Other News: Protests and Restaurant Incident
I saw a Date Republican posting on X today, said, “No business owner is boarding up tonight in fear of riots. The left and the right are not the same.” Well, I agree with that. But I remind you that riots don’t happen. They’re organized. The Republicans simply don’t have that machinery to organize these or the desire to do it, to organize these fake protests, the fake BLMs, the fake Antifas, the fake no-kings bullshit. So they don’t have that. They don’t have that corrupt enterprise. So that’s why. And I just think in general that people wouldn’t organize for anything on their own.
People are pretty mad and trying to figure out what to do. I saw a post by Matt Van Swol that Elon Musk was boosting. Matt said, “If I am being perfectly honest, Elon was right. I think I am beginning to lose the will to be tolerant.” So tolerant is what I just gave up. When I told you I’m all in, I’m done being tolerant. They have to be destroyed. They have to be destroyed. Musk said, “If tolerance means the end of Western civilization, then we cannot be tolerant.” And he goes on, “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.” Yep. But be smart. Who are you going to fight? You’ve got to know who to fight. So we don’t want to be shooting their Charlie Kirks. That’s not the fight we want to be in. We need to be smart and use legal means, but boy do we have to fight.
In other news that’s related, Trump made a surprise visit to a DC restaurant to show that it was safe to go out again. And apparently there were some left-wing protesters who got wind of it and started shouting at him in the restaurant. Now the question is, he didn’t announce that restaurant, so who tipped off the protesters? Better find that out. Because talk about a security violation. Oh my God. So I worry about that.
I should tell you that I posted this on X as well, that several years ago, I stopped doing public events. You know, I wasn’t invited to as many after I started backing Trump in 2016, but I still could have been invited to, you know, some colleges that wanted to cause some trouble and stuff. Berkeley invited me at one point, some organization did. But I started saying no to all public appearances for this reason. It’s because once you get called a Nazi or a Nazi supporter, it’s not safe to be around a thousand people. Because the odds of one of those people believing it’s literally true that you’re a Nazi and they’ve got to do something about it is really high. So I’ve been basically staying home for years. That’s why.
A Radical Solution for Gun Violence
Here’s an idea that I’ve floated before, but it never seemed like a real idea. But now it does. And this was written out—did I not write that down? Okay. Dr. Insensitive Jerk, who’s the anonymous economist I’ve mentioned before, he said he’s got a solution: that you should just ban the guns for Democrats. Now, that’s an idea you’ve heard from me before. He credits me with that. If you were to reduce guns to Democrats and let Republicans keep them, how much would that reduce the rate of crime in the country? Well, I don’t know. The Democrats think that fewer guns means less crime. And if the Democrats are doing most of the crime—most of the gun violence—I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s say it’s half of it. If you could make half of the gun violence go away just by Democrats saying, “Hey, guns are bad, we’ll give up ours,” why wouldn’t you do it? I would love to see Trump suggest this. Now, I don’t think there’s any chance it could happen for constitutional and legal reasons. But wouldn’t you like to make the Democrats have to deal with the question of whether guns should be banned only for them? Because it’s actually a fair question. It’s a fair question. Let me give you an analogy that may or may not work. So this is not an argument, it’s an example. Examples are not arguments, but it’s just so you have some context. You know that the members of the Sikh religion, they have as part of their religious practice that the men should carry a knife at all times. Now, of course, that was a problem at one point because people said, “No, you can’t take out a knife to the places where nobody else could take a knife just because it’s your religion.” But correct me if I’m wrong—I need a fact check on this—were they not eventually allowed to carry their knives under the understanding that they were a special group who were very unlikely to use them for violence? You know, maybe self-defense or something, but not to commit a crime. Now, I have not in my entire life ever heard of a Sikh who used his ceremonial knife to commit a crime or rob somebody or murder somebody. Does it even happen? I don’t know. So there is—I’m not sure about this, but there might be some precedent for the idea that someone could have a weapon and someone could not while living in the same country. So a religion special… so this, you know, the Democrat situation would not be about religion. But it would be fun to make them argue that they should have the right to guns when they believe that there should be fewer of them. What would be the problem with Democrats being the ones who gave up all their guns first? If the Democrats wanted it? Because seems like it would work.
International News: Israel and Hamas
In other news, well let’s wrap this up, the Charlie Kirk thing. There’s probably some news that’s happened even while I’ve been talking. We will stick together to get through this. You should definitely look to see if there’s anything you can do, even if it’s small, about this. All right? You know what I’m going to do, but maybe you could do something too. Even if it’s just talking about it or posting about it or persuading. But try to do something, you know, if it’s really gotten into you. Do something. And get some exercise today, please. Will you get outside if you can? This is a day where you need to sniff a tree. You really need to sniff a tree today. So get outside and maybe take a long walk and see if you can ground yourself again. We will be okay. Charlie’s family, they’re not going to be okay. And we should not kid ourselves that they’re going to get over it anytime, really anytime. It’s not even anytime soon. They’re not going to get over it. And we should be thinking about that. But I’ll see what I can do in my limited way.
Well as you know, Netanyahu and Israel bombed the leadership of Hamas who were, they thought, safely staying in Qatar. And Trump apparently did not know that was going to happen. Now he called Netanyahu and I guess they had a tense phone call when Trump said some version of, “Why’d you do that without talking to me?” And he didn’t think it was a good idea after the fact. And Netanyahu argued that it was a limited window. You know, they weren’t going to be there all day. And if they talked about it too much, maybe it couldn’t have happened. So I don’t know if that’s really the reason. Because it does feel like Netanyahu could get Trump on the phone if he called and said, “I can’t tell you why, but you need to put the President on the phone in the next 10 minutes.” I feel like he might have been able to get that because the President takes calls. If somebody walked into a meeting that he was in and said, “Netanyahu says you need to talk to him in the next 10 minutes,” you don’t think he’d take the call and pause the meeting? I feel like he would. So I’m not sure I believe Netanyahu. But Netanyahu is very good at risk management. And you can hate him for what he’s doing—I would get that people are on different sides of that—but he’s really good at risk management. And once again, I feel like he called it right. Because this is definitely in the category of, well, it might be better to apologize for it than to take a chance of not getting it done. Because how often are you going to get five Hamas leaders in one room? And the other thing is—I don’t know if Netanyahu calculated this specifically—but do you like the fact that Qatar is now out of the business of hosting bad guys? I like that. I like the fact that Qatar is saying, “Uh, maybe we just shouldn’t do that anymore. Maybe if the bad guys are in a war, they need to go somewhere else.” So I think Netanyahu killed several birds with one bombing attack, and that he got rid of that model where they can just live in luxury in Qatar while their soldiers are dying in the field. Nope, can’t do that anymore. If they’re dying, you’re dying. We’ll find you wherever you are. So I think that that was strategically probably brilliant. And I think that Netanyahu—I hate to say he’s managing Trump because the way I see it is they try to manage each other, they both have some influence over the other—but on this particular turn, Netanyahu probably managed Trump successfully. Don’t love that, because that’s not my country. You know, my country is the United States and I want us to be in charge of the United States and nothing else.
But given that Netanyahu in my opinion doesn’t want to make peace with Hamas, I think they want to capture all the territory and dismantle Hamas, and if he did a peace deal they would still be in power in some way. So I don’t think that Netanyahu has any serious interest in peace. I think he has a serious interest in completely clamping control down everywhere that they don’t already have it. And they’re doing a good job getting there. The only price—and I say only like it’s small—I think that Netanyahu is intentionally trading off their biggest asset. Now remember I told you I think he’s really good at risk management. What he’s risking by the way he’s prosecuting the war is the goodwill that—and whatever persuasive magic comes out of the Holocaust—I believe he’s trading that away. Because even though the 60,000-ish that have been killed in Gaza, that’s a big number—60,000 people, my God—but it’s only 1% of the six million who died in the Holocaust. However, as I mentioned earlier, we have a recency bias. So the six million that died decades ago, no matter how horrible that is beyond any imagination, what happened more recently still has sort of a bigger footprint because we’re affected by things that happened recently. So Israel is trading on October 7th but also trading on the Holocaust. You know, that would be their entire narrative for goodwill. And I think that Netanyahu—love him or hate him—is really good at risk management. And I believe that he is very intentionally saying, “You know what? This would be one time where giving up some of that Holocaust goodwill makes sense. Maybe we could get it back. But at the moment, we’re going to spend it.” And that looks like what he’s doing. So I remind you that I don’t back Israel. I’m not supporting them, and I’m not disavowing them either. I’m simply observing that they’re pursuing their self-interest as a country. That’s what every country does. Every one, all the time. They’re not the ones who are trying to do what’s good for their country. That’s every country. So that part I can observe without liking, maybe. You know, sometimes I’m not happy with it; sometimes I don’t care. But in either case, it doesn’t matter what I think. So I don’t have an opinion on whether it’s moral or ethical. I don’t believe that countries operate on a moral or ethical dimension. I don’t think they try to, and I don’t think they should. I think they should operate on pure self-interest. And if they’re not operating on self-interest, you should change your government. Get one that does. Your country should come first if you’re in that country. So don’t ask me my moral opinion about what Israel’s doing. I believe that if the other side was in power, they’d be doing lots of stuff you don’t like, and it would be really, really bad for the people in Israel. So it’s two sides that look like they want to—I won’t even use the word. I’m not going to say genocide because I don’t like word thinking. We all know what’s happening; we don’t have to put a word on it.
Future Tech and Domestic Policy
Apparently the military industry Anduril—that’s Lucky Palmer’s company—I guess they have a new product they’re selling to the Pentagon that would make US Army soldiers like superheroes. So they’d have some augmented reality glasses on that they could do all kinds of things that a regular soldier couldn’t do. But 159 million, they’re betting on it. So it—that could be a big deal. I feel that giving human soldiers these high-tech abilities is probably just a very short window between “why do we have a human there? What’s the point of having a human? A robot could do that.” So I feel it’s going to be robots, robots pretty soon. But at the moment it’s humans who are cyborgs.
According to Newsmax, the White House is going to cut grants for minority-serving colleges. So in other words, they’re going to stop giving money to colleges that are spending that money based on your ethnicity. And I said to myself… is it Palmer Lucky or Lucky Palmer? Well, I apologize to him in advance, and also for all the other times that I randomly put his name together. So what I’ve decided to do, is since he’s done the bad thing of having two first names and two last names, I’m going to say that I don’t care which order they’re in. It wasn’t my problem. I’m not the one who gave him two first names. So if he can have two first names, it’s sort of my life. Some people call me Adams Scott; some call me Scott Adams. Same problem, but I don’t complain about it. So he probably doesn’t either. Anyway, I like him. But I’m surprised that there were any colleges in 2025 that were still doing large expensive things only for some ethnicities but not for white men, I guess. So putting an end to that.
There’s a theory Popular Mechanics is talking about this, Darren Orf: that the internet will be more dead than alive within three years. Now, dead means that it’s bots instead of humans. So apparently there are now so many bots that the percentage of humans are going to be crowded out. So it’s called the dead internet theory, that eventually the internet will be only robots and that humans just won’t even be there. I suppose we would ask our robot, “Hey robot, what’s the capital of France?” And then the robot would go on the internet and then the robot would tell you the answer. But you wouldn’t have to go on the internet because the internet’s just robots. Or something like that. It’s called the dead internet theory. Anyway.
Well, the British Ambassador to the US got canned because it turns out he was one of the people who wrote a friendly birthday card to Epstein and he was real good friends with him, called him his best pal. Yeah, if somebody is his best pal, probably you gotta get rid of him.
And today the trial starts for Ryan Routh, the guy who attempted to assassinate Trump at the golf course. I guess he’s representing himself. I would pay a ticket to watch that. I would pay a ticket to watch him represent himself because he’s just crazy enough that it’s going to be fun. But he’s not so crazy that the judge will say, “All right, all right, all right, you know, I’m going to assign somebody, or we’re going to have to do this differently because you can’t handle this.” I think that might happen. I don’t know. What do they do? What do they do if somebody says, “I want to represent myself,” but then 10 minutes into it the judge realizes, “Okay, you can’t represent yourself. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Can they force somebody to take a lawyer? I don’t know. Somebody will tell me the answer to that question. It’s open court, you can just show up. I know he has a right to represent himself, but does that right ever get overridden by a lack of competence? You know, like many things do. You can’t own a gun if you’re a raving lunatic, for example. A lawyer sits next to them. They would do a competency evaluation and he would get a shadow lawyer. He’d have standby counsel. Some people are saying… there are so many lawyers on this—in my audience. How many of you are lawyers in the comments? Just tell me, lawyer or no lawyer. One of the reasons I get a lot of lawyers in my audience is because I talk about persuasion a lot. And if you’re a lawyer, what’s more important than persuasion? So a lot of lawyers watch just to pick up the persuasion tips and hear about the news at the same time. “Wouldn’t make it an insanity plea.” My understanding of insanity plea… wow, you deny being a lawyer. Some people are making sure I know that they’re not lawyers. You stayed at a Holiday Inn but you’re not a lawyer. All you need. Lawyer? All right. You’re not a lawyer but you cheated on your ethics class? Stop it.
Conclusion
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s all I have for you today. We’ll keep an eye on the news. Hope we have some progress. Nobody’s caught the shooter yet, right? The Charlie Kirk shooter? While I was on here, there’s nothing that broke, is there? No new words, is there? No new news. All right. All right, well I’m sorry my cat didn’t make an appearance today. she was here earlier before you were. What’s the best way to embarrass people celebrating Charlie’s death? Well, I think the ordinary shame mechanism works, where it’s just—it’s your attitude as much as your words. So if you show disgust, it might have some effect. But I don’t think they care about the disgust of people on the other team. Charlie Kirk is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. Yeah, I’m in favor of that. Graystone then. All right. I guess we got work to do, people. I’m going to talk privately to the beloved members of Locals. And the rest of you, I hope you can enjoy your day. but I’ll be private with the Locals people in 30 seconds.