Episode 1095 Scott Adams: Biden's Fake Lead in Polls Evaporates, Coup V2.0, Q and BLM

Scott Adams delivers a long-form opinion monologue touching on politics, media, and social unrest. Major claims in this chunk: Democrats have three routes to win (fair vote, mail-in fraud, or undermining election credibility), mail-in voting and the USPS cannot produce a credible election, CNN is shaping a narrative to justify replacing Biden with Kamala Harris, Black Lives Matter protests have damaged public perceptions and harmed prospects for reparations and employment for Black Americans, and COVID-19 comparisons between countries (e.g., Sweden, US, New Zealand) are intrinsically hard to judge. The tone is polemical, speculative, and anecdote-driven.
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Hey, everybody, come on in. I put on the shirt just for you. That's right. I was shirtless until a moment ago because we're in a heat wave and I don't have air conditioning. Sure wish I did. I have it in the other part of the house, but not my office. And how long does it take to fix air conditioning during a heat wave? Well, it's not fast, so maybe sometime in two weeks or so. So I may not be able to work in my office. I'm going to have to relocate somewhere for probably a few weeks, see what happens. But enough about me. Let's have the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker Challenger Stein, A canteen jargon 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 of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And it happens. Now go. Well, although I still have electricity where I live in my zip code, I'm in California. And it looks like a lot of California will not have electricity today. Why? Because our government in California is incompetent. It decided to be very green and socially correct. And the cost of that is getting rid of your nuclear power, maybe some of your gas power, and trying to make it more green. What's the problem with that? No electricity when it gets hot. So there will be people dropping like flies today because of bad government management. There will be people who probably die today because Governor Newsom didn't do his job. And the rest of the government. Because if you're getting rid of power sources when you don't have enough, that's going to come back and bite you. So if you'd like the rest of the country to be as well managed as California, you know how to do it. I don't know why anybody stays in California. The only reason I do is because. Connections and routes and, you know, I've got too many things here that I can't walk away from. But anybody who can leave, who stays in California, I don't know why you do it unless. Unless, like me, you've got connections. So Rush Limbaugh is getting in trouble today for. I guess I didn't hear it, but he was referring to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as Joe and Ho. Now, he didn't make that up. You've seen that going around the Internet. Here is my advice to Republicans, conservatives. That line of attack on Harris just doesn't work. So if the only thing you're trying to accomplish is to make Republicans and conservatives less popular and to get them fewer votes, then that's the way to go. Because, you know, the personal sexual past of anybody, we just can't make that part of politics. It just can't be. If she broke some laws, okay. But otherwise, since that didn't happen, it's just counterproductive. It's just counterproductive. Doesn't do anything. So I would say don't do that. All right, so here is the Democrats plan for retaining power or getting power, I guess, back from Trump. They have three ways to win. Three different ways to win. Number one, fair and square. Let's say Biden and Harris just get more votes. That's one way to win. Number two, rig the election with mail in votes and fraud and all that. Could that work? Absolutely, absolutely. Because you're only talking about some battleground states. How hard would it be to rig the votes with mail in votes in battleground states? Easy, easy. I would think so. They could win that way, but they have a third plan, which is the dangerous one, and that's the one that goes like this. Phase one makes sure that the election will not be seen as credible, no matter who wins. Now, this is a big deal because we're better off with an inaccurate vote count that we mistakenly think is credible than we would be if we got exactly the right vote count. Let's say there were no errors whatsoever. Impossible. But we'll just say that. But we don't think it's credible. That would be the worst case. Right. So if you had a choice of a good vote count that we don't trust or an inaccurate vote count that for whatever reason we do trust, you want the one where we trust because otherwise the country is in trouble and it looks like the Democrats are setting up a situation that guarantees the outcome will be in question. Wouldn't you say that? That's obvious at this point? It's fairly obvious that the intention of the mail in voting is to make sure that you can't tell who won. That is the intention. You know, you don't have to be a mind reader to know that if you could select from choices that have more integrity versus less in a national election, you would never choose the one with less integrity unless you wanted less integrity. Right. You would only choose that option if that's what you wanted. Otherwise you'd say, all right, everybody's got the same risk. Go to the voting places and vote. So once they get there, let's say Trump wins but narrowly. If Trump wins but narrowly, they're going to say that the vote was not valid and they're going to start whatever legal and or extralegal process to remove a president that they would then label as a dictator who refused to leave office. How do you know this is true? Because you can see the disinformation campaign very clearly on cnn. You're going to see more and more of this. It's going to be what happens if Trump refuses to leave after he loses. Right. Every time they bring up that hypothetical, they are forming a truth that they can then just transfer into whatever happens. So reality hasn't given us an outcome of election yet, but CNN is already forming the truth about it, which will then just be ported over to the actual situation. And so the truth that they're selling, the brainwashing, if you will, the disinformation campaign. And by the way, if I had heard anybody talk the way I'm talking right now five years ago, I would have laughed. I would said, you stupid conspiracy theorists, there's nobody trying to overthrow the government. But then we just watched it. We know for sure that the Democrats and the FBI and the media did, in fact try to overthrow the government. That's not even speculation at this point. It's proven demonstrable fact. If they did it once, would they do it a second time? Oh, the reason to do it a second time is way bigger the reason. There's way more incentive to do it a second time. Do you know why? Because we haven't yet jailed the people who did it the first time. If the, let's say I won't name any names, but don't you think there's some extra people who have some trouble coming? Some people whose names are, you know, you know, I've got a feeling that the Durham probe and the election are racing right now. And if Durham can get certain people indicted and. Or in jail before the election, that might be one thing. But those same people who might be indicted and or go to jail are probably going to push pretty hard for the option of making sure that the election result is not credible if Trump wins. Because in order for some people to stay out of jail, they might have to rig the election and remove the legally elected president. To stay out of jail? To stay out of jail. Would anybody rig an election to stay out of jail? Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you rigged the last election or you tried to by having a coup and removing the president, you know, in effect rigging it after the fact. I Guess you'd say so. Every bit of this is entirely, not only possible, but probable. I would go so far as to say probable at this point. Why is Adam Schiff not in jail? I don't even understand that. Clearly he should be in jail. Alright, now let's talk about what the media is doing to us. So we've got mailbox gate going on the belief that Trump is having all the mailboxes picked up on trucks and taken away so that people can't vote by mail. Now, of course, I saw that story and I said to myself, you know, I feel I'm going to wait a little bit. If you see a story that the President has ordered mailboxes to be physically removed so that people can't vote, the first thing you should think about that story is, maybe I'll wait a little bit on this one. I'm just going to take a little pause on this one because I don't want to jump right in on the removing mailboxes all across the country story because it's a little bit. Have you ever heard me say this before? A little bit on the nose. Once you learn this on the nose thing where the news story is a little too perfect. Isn't that a little perfect? The President is rounding up mailboxes. Your first thought should be, probably not. Probably not. And sure enough, you wait 24 hours, you look at the news, Breitbart's got a story about, I guess during the Obama administration, 14,000 mailboxes were removed. It's normal maintenance to remove them and relocate them into busier places. It's just business as usual. There's literally nothing that happened. So you got that then what else? What else we got going? Oh, there's, there's the fake story that the President is pushing a birther thing with Harris, which he's not exactly pushing. He's just saying other people brought it up. That's it. Yeah, people brought it up. Okay. I guess that's our national story. That's all we're going to talk about, is the fact that the President didn't do something, but you can kind of make it seem as if he did. If you word it right. That's news. What else we got going on? So New Zealand has delayed their election, which could not make me any happier because what the Democrats, well, not just the Democrats, but people have been saying for, I don't know, weeks now, New Zealand, they're the smart ones. New Zealand really knows how to handle a coronavirus. We should be more like New Zealand you know, it would be good if the United States were more like New Zealand. They've got their act together. They did what? They delayed the election because of the coronavirus. Now we don't like New Zealand. New Zealand's the wrong model. New Zealand does everything wrong. New Zealand is dumb. So you can expect that today New Zealand is not so smart when they don't do what we want them to do. So both Biden and Harris did not appear on any shows before the convention. What the heck does that tell you? Neither Biden or Harris or even any senior people from their campaign. They didn't send anybody out to talk on one of the biggest days of the week for the election. Are they even trying? Is there something going on? Here's what I think is going on. Hypothesis. When would be the best time to replace Biden with Harris? Would it be during the convention? Would it be that once all the Democrats are somehow at least connected by zoom and digitally connected, could it be that that would be the right time for, let's say, Joe Biden to say, I've got a sniffle, and because I have a sniffle, I couldn't possibly run for president or some minor problem like that? Is it possible that all of the conversation happening right now is around the question of who should be the top of the ticket? Do you think that they're having that conversation intensely? Well, here's the thing. If they get past the convention, it's going to be a lot harder to change the ticket, won't it? It feels like there's an optimal time to do it, and then there's. It's a little harder after that, but possible. So I think the conversation is about when to do it, not if. Because it's going to happen. It's either going to happen naturally during the term, it's going to happen effectively because everybody will assume that Harris is running the show, but it's going to happen. So I think it's possible that having nobody from the campaign talk about anything could be a risk management decision in which they know that anything they say today could make things worse. But there's nothing that could have been said yesterday on the news in terms of having your surrogates talking to the news. There's nothing that could have made it better because whatever happens with a shakeup of the ticket would be a nuclear bomb of news that would make anything that happened on Sunday unimportant unless it was a mistake. So the fact that they are playing to not make a mistake that aggressively tells me something's coming, there's a little extra coming, and they're at least talking about it. I'm not predicting that they'll make the change at the convention. I'm predicting that that's the conversation they're having. All right. I did a little poll in which I asked people if they thought the Black Lives Movement protests were making things better or worse for black Americans. Now, most of the people who answered it were probably people who were Trump supporters, probably more male, probably more white, 80% white, something like that. Because that's just who follows me on Twitter. It's not my fault. Don't blame me. I'm not the one who decides who follows me. I'm just telling you, that's who follows me. If you don't think that's diverse enough, I can't help it. But anyway, I think something like 83%, I didn't check it, recently said that the protests are making it worse for black people in the United States. Now, you might say to yourself, well, why are you asking a bunch of white people if this is making it worse for black people? Well, that's exactly the group to ask if you want to see how the people who might have prejudice are feeling. Because black people are not trying to convince other black people that they should get more respect, resources, etc. They're trying to convince the very kind of people who answered my poll. So that is the group you want to hear from. How do you feel about this segment of society now that they've expressed a, let's say the Black Lives Matter protests, et cetera, have been expressed the way they have been expressed. And if you get 83% or somewhere in that neighborhood saying it made things worse for black people, I think that probably did. And here's how I think it's worse. I think the. I hate to use this word, but you know what I'm talking about. The brand for black America, I think is ruined for a while, might take 10 years to recover that because it's such a bad look, because it's paired with looting and paired with pictures of destruction and violence, etc. Because all those things are paired, it's just become a terrible look. And then the Black Lives Matter leaders saying stuff such as the looting is reparations. I don't know how you could do a worse thing to the public you're trying to help. I mean, really, if black people in America thought that something like real reparations could be possible, would you want your, let's say, people who present themselves as leaders The Black Lives Matter leaders and organizers would. Would you want them saying that the looting was reparations? That's exactly what you'd want them not to say, because that just took it right off the table. I was sort of pro looking into reparations, at least having a legitimate conversation about what could and could not be done given constraints. I was all for that. I'm all for any conversation. And I think that that was, you know, worth having. But not now. Now it would just be a waste of time. I wouldn't spend one minute talking about reparations. You know, I'd wait another 10 years before bringing that up. So I think things are worse for reparations. They're certainly worse for racial harmony. And I think it's going to have the biggest impact on employment. I think black employment is going to take a hit because a lot of people are going to say, you know, I just don't want somebody who feels bad about me. So it won't even be a question that the employer feels bad about the employee. They'll just say, why would I hire somebody I think might have a bad attitude about me? You know, and that would be fair. I don't know if it would be legal, but it would certainly be reasonable to not hire people. You have a high, likely a high degree of certainty that they don't like you. And of course, Black Lives Matter has their priorities upside down, which is the worst thing. They're focusing on the police element of it, which needs a look. I'm not saying that you should brush that aside. There's something real that needs to be looked at there and made better. But it is also their lowest priority, or should be, because it affects the fewest people. Highest priority, of course, is the teachers unions, which are the source of ongoing systemic racism. So if Black Lives Matter can't even fight systemic racism, right. They're going after the lowest priority instead of the highest priority, the teachers unions. It's hard to give them any credibility. So I think they're way behind. So CNN News is about QAnon, because that embarrasses the president and about the US Postal Service being actually quite dependable. So CNN is trying to brainwash the country into thinking mail service is dependable. Let me ask you this. Have you ever had somebody else's mail delivered to your mailbox? I think you have. I think yes. Have you ever mailed anything that didn't get to its destination? Oh, I think you have. Has anybody ever mailed something to you that you didn't get? Oh, I think, yeah, you've had that experience I mentioned before. My father worked for the post office for 30 years. Every night he would come home and over dinner he would complain about some post office inefficiency. So I'm as biased as you could possibly be about the efficiency of the post office. Let me tell you one other little anecdote. Back in the days when I would draw the comic strip Dilbert on paper and I would take a copy of it and mail the original to my syndicator, who would then take copies and send it off to the newspapers. Well, what happens once the post office where you mail your originals? What happens once they figure out your name? What happened after they recognized my name and realized I was the Dilbert creator and I was sending a package that was about the size of original art? What do you think happened to my original art? Stolen. Yeah, stolen. Was I the only cartoonist who put original art in the mail and once the post office realized who was mailing it, they stole it? Nope. It happened to other cartoonists. I'm not going to name names, but there's a well known cartoonist who couldn't mail his his work because the post office stole it every time. Now, I once had these years before there were gofundmes, I wrote a story about somebody who's having trouble on a newsletter I used to do years and years ago. And I think I asked people to, I don't know, send, if they wanted to donate to this person who was in a bad situation, they could send money to this post office box. Now, what I didn't realize is that people wouldn't send necessarily checks. So something like 80% of the people who send some money to that post office box put cash. They put cash in it. Now, of course they tried to disguise it. You know, you put paper around the cash or whatever. But as soon as the post office realized that any cash, there must have been at least one that you could sort of tell there was a dollar in there or something, as soon as the postal employees realized that the mail going to this one post office box had cash in it, how much of the cash got through after the day that they realized it was cash? None. None. They stole every bit of it. You know, there were like empty envelopes that would show up and it just like stopped one day, the moment they realized it was cash, they stole it all. So the Democrats are trying to sell you the most ridiculous notion that the post office could take a 30% hit to their traffic. And given the current amount of efficiency that we would have something like a credible election. That way there is not really any chance of having a credible election with massive mail in votes. It's just not a thing. And it doesn't matter who wins. It doesn't even matter what happens. It is not credible as a system. In other words, there's nothing you can do between now and then. There's just nothing you can do. There's not enough time. Now let me test out a. I need you to fact check this for me. I saw a claim that you can tell by the barcode and some codes on the outside of your ballot if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Can somebody confirm that that's true or not true? And the claim is that under the barcode there's this what looks like a long series of random numbers and letters, but one of the letters is either a D or an R indicating whether you're registered Democrat or Republican. I don't know if that's true. Can somebody fact check that for me? Because again, remember the rule. If something's a little bit too on the nose, it's probably not true. So if you hear that the mail in ballots have some kind of indicator on it, subtle one, but if you knew what it was, you could look for it. That the indicator will tell you if you're Democrat or Republican, that is too on the nose. Meaning if that's true, well, that would be amazing. So usually things that if they're true, well, that would be amazing are usually not true. So somebody needs to confirm that this is true to me before I will believe it. But there's a report out there that you can tell just by looking at the envelope. If that's true, there's really no chance of a fair election. No chance. And this is the funniest part. If you want to know how dumb the post office is. And again, I can say this because my father worked for the post office and he was one of the dumbest guys I've ever known. True story. I hate to say that he's no longer with us, so I can say that, but the postal union decided to endorse Biden. That's right. While we're having this big national debate about whether the post office can be a major element of a fair election, the postal union just endorsed one of the people running. Now, that should have been the end of it. The moment the postal union endorsed one of the candidates, that was the point when the Democrats should have said, oh, okay. That really just changes everything. I see. We can't use the system anymore. Because now it's not only bias, but it's announced a bias. They announced a bias. That's really the end of it. If we were any kind of a competent country, we would just say, oh, well, there's still a debate about whether it could be done fairly, but there's no longer a debate about whether it can be seen as credible. And if you think those are the same debate, they're not. So let me say that again because it's the most important thing. There's a debate about whether it can be accurate, and that's separate from whether the public can ever see it as credible. And once the postal union has picked a side, that's it. That's the end of any real chance it could be seen as credible. It can't be because the people delivering the damn mail just told you who they want to win. I don't think it could be any clearer than that. That you can't overcome that hurdle. That is a mountain that no amount of hard work can overcome. You can do anything you want. You could put a trillion dollars into making sure that the actual mail delivery was accurate. It would make no difference at this point because the postal union picked a preferred candidate. It's over. This question is absolutely over. But the fake news will try to conflate those two things and act like the credibility and the actual performance are really the same thing. And then there's another bit of magic where they have to act as though the post office does a good job. Now, as somebody who is bad at analogies said on Twitter, oh, sure, because by the way, you can tell that this is a Democrat talking because they only use sarcasm instead of reasons. So don't look for the reason. It's just sarcasm. Oh, sure, we don't trust the post office to deliver the ballots, but we do trust it for our Social Security checks. Well, I think they do those electronically. But we do trust it for all of our important other stuff. Oh, no, the only important thing we don't trust it for is the election. Yeah, all these other important things we trust it for, just not this one thing. Right. So that's a Democrat argument. It doesn't say anything. It just says it in that tone. So there's no actual thinking or rational anything. It's just that tone. Now, here's what's wrong with it. Of course, if somebody sends you a check and you don't get it because it got lost in the mail or it comes a few days late, that doesn't change too much, does it? There isn't too much that's going to go wrong. If your check is a couple days late or even if it gets lost, you can always call the person who lost it, as I have. Let me tell you how many times that I've not gotten a check that was mailed to me. 25 times. Maybe in the course of my professional Life, something like 25 times I've had to put a stop on a check or ask somebody to put a stop on a check because the mail didn't deliver it, probably 25 times. And so the next thing that the news will try to convince you is that they're actually good when you have a time constraint. So the reason these analogies are not appropriate is because these are low risk things that don't have a timing element to them. Whereas the election is the highest of all risk. It's literally the highest risk in the country. If you get that wrong, everything else falls apart. It doesn't matter what you're doing right with your economy, anything else. If the election doesn't hold as credible, everything else falls apart. It's all dependent on that. That's the way the system is designed. So we're going to have a non credible result and the news will try to convince us that it was credible. It's the most incredible, the most amazing act of brainwashing you'll ever see. All right. Oh, so you notice that there are riots and massive shootings and gun deaths and stuff. And I guess Chicago and Portland and Seattle. I don't know if New York is still doing it. And they're getting pretty violent and terrible. And every day that they go on, Trump gets closer to election because Trump has played this perfectly. From a political perspective, you could argue about, you know, functionally, but from a political perspective, the best thing Trump could have done is continuously offer federal help and let the cities decline it. And then once they've declined it, allow that to stand, not overrule them. Now, the minor exception was federal people protecting federal property, but that's an exception. That's federal property. So by Trump not acting like a dictator, in other words, not sending in troops and overriding the cities and the states, he looks very much not like a dictator. And it makes the other side, the Democrats running these riot torn cities, look like, well, do you want more of that? Because that's what they want to bring you nationally. I mean, if I were the Trump campaign, I would do nothing but show video from the riots and say, this is what they want to bring to you nationally. Because you know, that's not even a little bit wrong. That's not even a slight bit of hyperbole. What you're seeing in the inner cities is exactly what you would get everywhere if those same kinds of policies were taken nationally. Same kind of policies, in this case being soft on crime. CNN has managed to disappear all of the riots like it's like they don't exist. And also the Kleinsmith stuff. So the country is having like mass, these big riots every night. And there was a coup that we now know at least one of the central players of this coup, this Kleinsmith guy. And that's sort of not treated as news, not really news. The Millie Weaver thing I haven't gotten interested in yet. I guess that's been removed. So I guess that's let's say contentious. Contentious, no. Some debatable reporting there. So I don't know what the truth is on any of that here. Let me see if I can clear something up that a few times I've made some Twitter comments that were incomplete and therefore misleading. And it goes like this. Why is it that the George Floyd story is a national story? Whereas the 5 year old or the toddler or whatever he was who was killed by his neighbor while he was just in his front yard, why is one of them a national story and the other is ignored? Because Fox News and others are trying to say, hey, what about this story? Is it only because the victim was white? And here's what the public doesn't understand about what makes a national story. Now I deal with trying to turn things that are not stories into, into national stories. That's actually my job. So if I'm trying to get my book promoted, and let's say it was the original Dilbert books, I would tie them to a national story, which is, hey, there's lots of downsizing and offshoring back in the 90s. And here's a character that has the same situation. So Dilbert got on the COVID of magazines, etc. Because I did what everybody does when they want to elevate an individual story, they attach it to something that's already a story. You can't make a story out of nothing. It's really hard. But you can attach anecdotes to existing stories and then they, they get some attention. So the George Floyd thing was attached to a national story. You can argue whether it was a true or false story, but you can't argue that it was a national high level story about black citizens being abused by cops. So because it was already A story, any video especially. And it's the video that makes it extra, extra strong. It's not the video alone. It still could have been a story without the video. But I think you'd all agree the video gave it that extra power. So I think I said on Twitter, it has to be on video. Let me adjust that to say it doesn't have to be on video, but it's way, way, way stronger if it is. So the problem with the child who is killed by the neighbor is that does not attach to any national story. And when the conservative side of the world tried to do that and say, hey, hey, this is a story too, why are you ignoring it? Why are you being hypocrites? They weren't, they weren't being hypocrites because the child who was killed, as tragic as that is, and unique in its way, in a bad way, it just doesn't attach to a national story. But suppose the Democrats had run that same story. It would have been a gun control story. A gun control story. Right. It would have been a story about there are too many guns and therefore look what happened, this kid got shot. But because the races were the wrong races, it doesn't fit in with the Black Lives Matter story, doesn't fit in with the protesters. So places like CNN would be disinclined to attach it to a national story about gun control because it would work against their other propaganda. Now that part's true, but if you're a conservative, I wouldn't try too hard. Yeah, his name is Cannon Hit Nat, if that's, if that's the right name. So I wouldn't try too hard to get this attached to a national story if you're a conservative, because it's going to get attached to gun control. Now you might say to yourself, but wait, Scott, what about the national story of black on white murder? What about that? Because, and I looked that up just to see what the stats are on that. And I think it's something like, like I actually have those stats. And it's always hard to find stats when you're talking on public and looking for your stats. You can never find your stats. How the hell did I not find that? Oh, here it is. There are more than twice as many black and white homicides compared to white on black. So the Black population is 13% of the country, white is 80 something percent, but they have roughly equal number of crimes against the other, which would mean that the black on white crime as a percentage would be sky high. Now why is that not A national story. Do you ever ask yourself that why is it not a national story that white people are being slaughtered by black people? Now, I use the word slaughtered to get myself canceled because that. That's the part will be taken out of context. That's a lot of murder. There's a lot of murder going on. What is. What is. Yeah, it can't be 80%. What's the percentage of. Oh, you know what it does? I think in the stats, the Hispanic population was added to the standard white population. So I think when they do the stats, they're adding Hispanic and white together as one category. So then it gets into the 80s. Not that you would do that necessarily, but that's what it is. So ask yourself why is that not a national story? Now, of course, you can explain it by income. Income groups and stuff like that, but it is not a story that you could tell without getting canceled. Could you imagine any national news program doing a story about the epidemic of black people killing white people? You can't really. You can't even imagine it in this country. That could never happen. And because data can be used to make any case you want, you could simply reverse it and say, oh, sure, but white people are killing just as many black people, so, you know, it's about equal. Well, my point is that we sort of decide what the story is and then things get attached to it. But it's the national press that decides what's the story, and they have decided that it's not good for their personal careers to emphasize any racial disparity in crime. And. And so they don't. And so therefore, that story of the tragic story of the child who got murdered by the neighbor doesn't tie to a national story. So if you think it should, that would be fair to say. But if you're wondering, hey, why are these being treated differently? That's the reason. It's just not tied to a national story. And that's the way it always works. All right, coronavirus deaths, I think they're over 175,000 for this country, predicted at least another 24,000 in the coming month. So we will easily, it looks like, pass, 200,000 dead. That's a number which I had asked people who were saying it's just the flu. Early on, I'd said, well, if you think it's just the flu, can you commit to a number beyond which you'd say, oh, God, that wasn't just the flu. And one of the. One of the. What would I say, Coronavirus. I don't want to say skeptic, but skeptic in terms of how bad it would be had said 200,000 would be the number at which you'd say, okay, all right, for 200,000 deaths, that's definitely not the flu, especially since the 200,000 you only got to because of the close down and the severe punishment of the economy. So does anybody still argue it's just the flu? Has that population of people now shrunk to the point where it's a different conversation. Conversation about how to handle it, but not so much that it's just the flu? So I don't know if that transition is going to happen, but I don't hear the just the flu people being as loud on social media anymore. Speaking of statistics, do you believe that we will ever know, no matter when, at any date in the future, whether the US did worse or better than other countries? Do you think we'll ever know that if you said yes? Oh, yeah, we'll definitely know. I mean, once it's all done, we'll look at the data, lots of researchers will dig in, they'll find out what worked, what didn't, and we will know if President Trump did a good job compared to the other leaders. If you believe that can be known. You've never been involved in this kind of work, meaning data analysis of any kind. We can't know that it is completely unknowable unless it was some major obvious thing that anybody could tell. But if you tried to suss it out of the data and, and the only thing you're doing is saying, I'm not going to look at the decisions he made. I'm just going to see how it turned out. You're never going to be able to do it. And here's why. Would it be most appropriate, I saw this yesterday, for the US As a whole to be compared to the other wealthy countries? Would that be a good comparison? Well, I would argue that you need to take the islands out of it. I think you need to take your Taiwans, your South Korea, which is effectively an island because of the dmz, your New Zealand's and maybe your Australia. That's a pretty big island. But I think you need to look at the islands separately and say, okay, these have the most in common with each other because of the island element of it, and see how the islands did. So if you're throwing the islands in with wealthy countries, well, already that result is less credible. Okay, that's just one problem. Here's some more. The United states is really 50 different entities. 52 if you count Puerto Rico and Guam or whatever. So should we say that the average of those, all those entities is what the United States is, or should we treat each of the states like a country and say, all right, how did New York State do compared to Europe? Right. Because actually New York State's doing pretty well. They had a tough spot. Wasn't their fault for the most part. You could argue about the old people being put back in their senior care places. That looks like a mistake in hindsight. I don't know if it was as obvious when it happened. Obviously it wasn't obviously a mistake when it happened. But wouldn't we find, for example, that we have, let's say, just guessing, probably more than 40 states who are doing better than Europe. Would that be true? Would we have 40 of our states doing better than Europe? Maybe, but then those European countries would say, wait, wait, wait. If you get to cherry pick your states, we're going to say if you take, just pick a random, all right, we'll do the same thing. We'll take Frankfurt out of our equation. I'm just guessing that Frankfurt had bad coronavirus. I don't know if it did. We'll just take that out of our equation. How about that? And then we beat you again. So basically everybody who wants to look good is going to have an argument, well, don't count the senior care places. You have to take those out. That was just tragic. But if you're really going to compare, that was just one event that had a big impact. You got to take that out. So people argue about whether that should be in around, whether the state should be compared, whether you're on the same curve. We don't know. And then here's the thing that's so completely unknowable and the thing that's going to drive me fricking crazy for the next five years. It goes like this. As far as I can tell, Sweden did the dumbest strategy and it worked out the best. Now that of course creates a situation where you can say that they didn't have a good strategy or that they did. You could just spin it any way you want. So here's why it was the dumbest plan. When Sweden went for herd immunity, the assumption was they'd have to get to 60 or 70% infection. Turns out it's probably closer to 20 because people seem to have some natural immunity. And if Sweden had known it was going to be 20, well, they're geniuses. Oh, they're geniuses. We'll talk about Italy in a second. But Sweden, thinking that they were heading toward herd immunity of 60 or 70%, which by any measure would have been quite a big death toll, probably would have crashed their health care system. They probably would have ended up closing more stuff. They would have had to more aggressively close down because the public would say too many people are dying or health care is dying. So if Sweden's plan had worked the way they thought it would work, here's the key part. If Sweden's plan had worked the way Sweden thought it would work, if it had gone exactly the way they wanted it to, it would have crashed their whole economy. Because they thought it was 60 to 70% for herd immunity, they got incredibly lucky. I think now, I think we'll probably have to wait to see if this is real. But the only way that Sweden got down to basically something like zero deaths lately is because herd immunity was a fraction of what everybody thought. Nobody knew that. They did the dumbest strategy and hit a home run. It was like they were blindfolded and they were up to bat and somebody threw a ball and they swung really hard and they hit the frickin ball and they got a home run. And it wasn't because they were good batters. They had a blindfold on. That's what happened. So it's going to drive me crazy that we will ever be compared to Sweden. It's like, look how smart Sweden was. No, they were the dumbest country, but they got the luckiest. That's what it looks like to me. So if it turns out that 20% is herd immunity, and it also is true that the United States has rampant infections where Europe does not, who's the smart one? Right. Because now we've seen Sweden. If we'd never seen Sweden hit herd immunity, we would also think it was 60 or 70%. But now that we know, it's closer to 20 and we know that, in all likelihood, I'm not sure you can say you know anything, but it seems very likely that the reason that New York City and New York State are doing well is that they have so many infections that they got their herd immunity. And we might be the next one who hits herd immunity simply because we didn't control it that carefully, same as Sweden. So if it turns out that we get back to a functioning economy and fewer deaths because we hit herd immunity faster than Europe, who's the smart one? Would we be the smart one? Because our economy would be kicking back into gear, our deaths would be zero. We'd be on the other side of it, like Sweden, while Europe is still trying to tamp down every fire. Oh, no, we better close down again. Better close down again, better close down again. And they're going to end up in the same place. So my basic point is that we will never know who did better than anybody else because everybody was guessing. We all have good hindsight. None of the data is reliable and nobody can decide what two things should be compared. I will add this following prediction. I think that the reason that the herd immunity is so low somewhere 20% ish, might be because the vitamin D thing. I think we're going to find out that the people who had the lowest vitamin D as well as any other medical problems were just the entire group that could have a problem because it turns out that you have low vitamin D if you're African American, if you're overweight, if you've got diabetes, if you're old, if you're probably in a senior care facility, like all of the things, all of the types of people were at high risk, coincidentally also had very low vitamin D. I think in the end we're going to find out that they were the ones at risk. And if we had tested for vitamin D levels, we could have really done better. All right, now some of you are going to say, how can herd immunity be 20% when we know that at least in one city in Europe it was over 50%. And there are some prisons which are also over 50%. And there actually is a perfectly good reason why some environments don't get herd immunity at 20%. And it has to do with density. So if you got people packed together, such as in a jail, it doesn't matter that herd immunity would normally be 20%. They're just basically marinating in virus. There's just so much of a viral load. If you get enough infected people in a small area like a jail, that in that case, as with at least one cruise ship as well, it'll rush past 20%. But those are artificial environments where people can't get away from each other too well. So it could be true that a prison or a cruise ship or a certain town could have a 50% situation for herd. Another one might be 20% if you're just living in the country. So those can be compatible. All right, CNN has a poll that shows that the. Here's how it's worded on, I think, Breitbart, that Joe Biden's lead has evaporated in the last two months. A new poll from CNN shows this is a CNN poll showing Biden's lead has evaporated. Now, let me ask you this. Let's say you are planning a coup version 2.0. And let's say, let's say you wanted to maybe keep all your options open. And one of the options would be to replace the top of the ticket with Kamala Harris. If you were an illegitimate news organization whose leader Jeff Zucker was personally and has for a long time been a promoting Kamala Harris, what do you think your polls would show right before the Democratic Convention? I believe your polls would show that Biden has a lead that evaporated. Because if CNN wants Kamala Harris to take the top spot, they are going to have to create a narrative that says that Biden cannot win the way he's going. In other words, they're going to say, ah, the weakness in the party. It's obviously the top spot because, you know, and now his lead has evaporated according to cnn. Huh? How convenient. Just when the Democrats are at that decision point of deciding whether they need to make a change at the top just at the right time, CNN that is very pro. Kamala Harris coincidentally produces their worst poll results for Joe Biden. Huh? Interesting. What a coincidence. Or is it? Now, I would say that one of the reasons that maybe Trump will look better in all the polls, because I would expect all the polls to start narrowing, especially as we get closer to the vote. And here's the thing that I don't think you can underestimate the degree to which Democrats saw Biden as a seat filler and not a real candidate. Because as long as Trump was running against a generic Democrat, that generic Democrat didn't have any flaws. And Biden was really just a seat filler. He was just a stand in a proxy, if you will, for a generic Democrat, a person who was not Trump. But now you put it in Kamala Harris, people say, well, she's the real president. And suddenly it's Trump versus an actual person who has actual history and actual targets and actual flaws. It's the first time until now, Trump was running against a generic. Even with Biden in there, it was just a generic. Now it's a real person. So you would expect that the flaws of a real person would seem bigger than the flaws of a generic, because that person can be perfect in your mind. And the funniest part is that the battleground states, the only ones that matter, have how close are they? They're dead even. So the battleground states are dead even. Do you Know what dead even means in a CNN poll? If the CNN poll says the battleground states are dead Even, statistically, it's 49 to 48. That means that Trump is ahead and the battleground states. There's no other way to see that because, you know, there are some shy Trump supporters in there. How shy are the Trump supporters? Let me put it to you this way. You know those gigantic Trump boat rallies that you've seen on social media, but you don't see in the news because the news doesn't cover it? Those. I'm just looking at a comment that's making me laugh. The reason that Trump supporters have to have the rally in the water is because they can't do it on land. Trump supporters could not put on their Trump hats, pick up their Trump flags and say, hey, let's meet in the park and have a Trump rally. It would be dangerous. It's dangerous to be on land. As a Trump supporter that could be identified, it's actually dangerous. And so Trump supporters didn't just find a cool way to show their support. It's like, hey, boats are cool. If we have a lot of boats and it's the summer, it's going to look pretty cool. Let's have a lot of boats. Yeah, that's part of it. That's part of it. But the bigger part is the Republicans are not safe on land. Democrats could have a pro Biden parade and they would know. They would not be harassed, maybe verbally, but not physically. Right. Democrats can have a rally on dry land. You live in a country where this sort of snuck up on you. It's not an accident that the Trump supporters had to leave the continental United States. I mean, they're still in US Waters, but they had to leave the continental United States. Literally physically leave it. Leave the United States to have a Trump rally. I mean, they're still in our waters, but they have to leave the dry land. That's not a joke. There's no joke there. That is actually what happened. They couldn't feel safe on dry land. Now, you tell me that these people are telling the truth when pollsters call them and say, who do you support? Not a chance. Not a chance. I told you that when a pollster called me. I think the first time it's ever happened. The moment I realized it was a pollster and I realized what the question was going to be about in my head, I said, oh, I'm going to tell them Biden, because the last thing I'm going to do is tell them the truth. And, you know, it turns out they asked me if I was registered to vote and I said no. And that was the end of it. So I didn't have to lie, but I would have. So at the moment, it looks like there's no real chance that Biden can win as the top of the ticket. And that means that CNN is going to soften up the public by giving some low poll numbers. You should expect that any other polling company that's friendly to Biden is going to show his lead narrowing. You should see all of the left leaning polls narrow quickly because they're going to try to create the story that, well, sooner than. It's sooner than better. Sooner is better to replace the top of the ticket. Better get this going. Better hurry up because he's not going to win. Look at the polls. He's not going to win. You better put somebody stronger in there. Hey, who do we put in there? Kamala Harris. All right, Somebody says, dude, Trump was holding two rallies a week until Covid unlay and everything. Well, that was Trump. Trump has the advantage of having lots of security and a secure location that's still safe. But if you were to just say, hey, why don't we have like a Trump parade? Or why don't we all meet in the park and we're just, it's just us. There's no Trump, it's just us. What do you think would happen? It's a different situation. Have you noticed that the people who disagree with me are just bad at analogies? I think the Democrats have basically two modes of arguing. A bad analogy and sarcasm. And sometimes they combine the two. Because you saw that even though that was a written comment about the person who said that Trump has had rallies, even the written comment was written as sarcasm. Dude, Trump has had two rallies and everything, even spelled everything in that sarcastic way and air thing. They can't actually have any kind of a rational debate. It's so universally true. It's just a bad analogy with sarcasm. And they actually think that that's some kind of thinking, some kind of point. It's really not. It's actually not. It's just sarcasm. Sarcasm isn't reasons. And analogies are not reasons either. They're just something that reminded you of something else. That's it. That's the whole thing. Yeah. Try to put a Trump bumper sticker on your car. Better yet, put a Trump bumper sticker over any car that you think is a Biden sporter. No, don't do that. Their cars will get wrecked. Take that back. Do not do that. Although I know it's been done as a prank. Somebody says Warren, I don't think so. But, you know, nothing can be ruled down at this point. I don't think Warren could have a chance against Trump. Somebody says, what's up with Trump helicopters flying with four missiles? Why wouldn't it? You don't think Air Force One has defense? I would expect the helicopters to be armed. Why wouldn't they be? All right, somebody says the comment was funny. Jesus, ease up, Boomer. Now, see that. Now, first of all, the comment was meant to be a serious comment, that Trump has rallies. So here's somebody who can't tell the difference between humor and not humor, actually can't tell the difference and so has decided to call me a Boomer because didn't have any other reasons. So I guess that's the third argument. There are three Democrat arguments. Bad analogy, sarcasm, and calling people boomers kind of it. But this one won't have to worry anymore because he is now relegated to the blocked world. Goodbye. All right, that's all I got. Did you cash out your Kamala bet? Well, she's not official yet. She's not official. I have two bets on Kamala, one for the top of the ticket and one for vice president. Both of them were long odds, so if either one of them comes in, it pays for the other one. So I'm at least going to win for vice president, which would pay for my other bet and more. But if she becomes the top of the ticket, I'm going to make some serious money. So I still have those bets in place. Oh, QAnon, I don't know what to say about Q. It seems like CNN wants to make that more of a story. Q has become a bit of a religion. I think people. I think people just enjoy the whole Q thing. I just can't take it too seriously. Somebody says if I see an American flag, I think Trump supporter. I think you're right. I think you're right. I don't think that the Democrats use the American flag anymore. I think that they too, see it as a Republican symbol. All right, that's all I got for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Slaughter beaters at 100%.
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