Scott Adams (vlog) reacts to the high-profile arrest of Huawei’s CFO in Canada and the planned U.S. extradition, questioning the legal basis (allegations of trading with Iran) and highlighting geopolitical effects: moving alleged Chinese misbehavior from quiet government-to-government negotiations into headline news and reducing China’s ability to stall. He argues the move gives the U.S. a public advantage. Adams also predicts the Mueller investigation will produce an ambiguous outcome that supporters and opponents will each interpret to confirm their prior beliefs (a ‘two-movie’ split). He skeptically examines common claims about Russian election influence—noting that influence operations included ads favoring both Trump and Clinton, that the DNC (but not RNC) was hacked, and that Don Jr. took a meeting—arguing these facts better support the idea of sowing chaos than clear pro-Trump intent. Brief mention of Khashoggi coverage as politically motivated.
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Hey, everybody. Come on in here. Yes, I am in a new location, but that won't change the deliciousness that is coffee with Scott Adams. It's good anytime, anywhere. So join me if you will. And lifting your cup, your mug, your glass, your container, your stein, your chalice filled with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip. Ah. Now, I realize I might be in the wrong time zone for many of you, and I believe I am, but that's because I'm in the wrong time zone. So at the moment, I'm in Utah, and Christina's still asleep, so I'm. I'm gonna make it a quick one this morning. So we got a few topics this morning. One of them is the provocative arrest by the Canadians who are going to turn over to the United States and extradite the CFO for Chinese tech company whose name is pronounced Huawei. I don't know how it's pronounced. H U A W E I. I'm gonna have to watch the news today to see if anybody could pronounce it. Yes, I'm in Park City. So you're probably thinking to yourself, this is a very. This is a very provocative move that we would actually arrest a top executive of a main Chinese company. And I guess somebody's saying, I pronounce it Huawei, the name of the company. And the interesting thing about this is apparently the charge has something to do with trading with Iran. So this Chinese company, Huawei, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, was alleged. Alleged to be trading with. With Iran. Now, I don't know how that makes it against American law. I'm a little unclear on how a Chinese citizen can be accused of breaking a law that America can prosecute if they didn't do it in America, and it didn't have anything to do directly with Americans. So I'm not even entirely sure how we have the legal standing to arrest a CFO of a Chinese company. But in any case, we have. Now, what's interesting about her is apparently her father was the founder of the company, and it's a major company. So there's very little chance that this does not catch the major attention of President Xi and the Chinese leadership. But I think this is an amazingly gutsy move, because one of the things that Trump is good at doing is taking things to the home field advantage. You notice that when Trump is doing anything in public and he's tweeting, he has sort of a home field advantage. And you can see that, again with this situation, because where the President is strongest is when a topic is in the news, when everybody's talking about it. And this arrest takes something that China was doing and moves it from some kind of a background law enforcement thing, government to government, and it elevates it to the top headline news. Now if you're negotiating with China and there are a thousand things they're doing that you don't like and you're trying to negotiate one after another, don't you think they're just stalling? Don't you think that the primary, the primary strategy for China is just to stall? Maybe you say, oh yeah, we'll do that and then just don't do it. And then another year goes by and you bring them back and say, hey, I thought you said you were going to do X, but you haven't done it. Oh yeah, yeah, let's talk about that some more. So what are the primary things you would expect given that there are so many topics that China is allegedly violating in trade and trade with Iran, trade agreements in general, stealing intellectual property. So this is gigantic range of things they're doing that we don't think they ought to be doing. And as long as it's a private conversation, government to government, they really have the upper hand, don't they? Because they can just sort of stall. You know, we can't, we can't do much about it. But by arresting this super high profile executive in Canada, it shows an entirely different level of, let's say, badassness. But more importantly, it moves the topic from government to government to headline news. And that's where China doesn't want it to be. The last thing China needs is for the things that our government knows they're doing to become higher visibility. So one of the things that this move accomplishes is it takes it out of the home field advantage of China, which is government to government. Hey, let's keep this quiet, let's get this taken care of. Why do you keep saying you'll do things and then not doing them? That's their advantage to the public domain where now it's a headline. So every time there's a headline, the citizens of China get to learn for the first time what their government is up to. So I don't think that the Chinese government wants their own population to be fully informed about what they're up to. So this is fascinating. So we'll keep an eye on this. My first impression was probably the same first impression most of you had, which is, oh no, it's going to be war now that's an escalation. My second impression after thinking about it a little bit was that we probably just shook the box and got a better setup, but we'll see. Now, I have a prediction about the outcome of the Muller investigation. Are you ready? You're probably wondering, Scott, since you're so good at predicting things, can you tell us how the Muller investigation will turn out? Well, have you noticed how everything else turned out? I'm going to make the bold recommendation or the bold prediction that the way the Mueller investigation turns out will be exactly like everything else has turned out. Why would it be different? How did everything else turn out? Reality split into two movies. When the president got elected, half of the country thought, he's not really my president. And they went into this whole movie where he was going to be leaving office in months, and, you know, it was just some temporary problem they could. They would get rid of. And then half of the country had a new president and said, hey, eight more years. So every time we have a situation where we think we're going to get a clean result, we never really do, do we? We don't get a clean result with China. Hey, let's do something about fentanyl. Well, they said they will, but I'll bet a lot of days are going to go by where we don't see anything happen. And then we thought we would get a Supreme Court, you know, nominee who's on the court, but it's always in question. Maybe he's going to be impeached. We thought we would get a clean. We thought we would get a clean midterm election, but so many elections are being challenged. So if it's like everything else, the Mueller investigation will go this way. The people who think Trump is up to no good will believe that's what they saw. The people who think Mueller is going to say terrible things about Trump will believe that's what the report says. The people who think that Trump didn't do anything, you know, beyond what you imagined he would do, which is keep his options open for business. A lot of people talking to a lot of people, but none of it criminal. So I think the world will split once again into two clean and different versions. So the only thing that can't happen is that the president can't be in serious legal trouble. So the only thing that can't happen is a Mueller investigation that makes it look like the president will be jailed. Instead, it will be an ambiguous report in which everybody sees exactly what they want to see. Trump's supporters will see will say, well, it's just a bunch of blah, blah, blah, but there's no legal jeopardy. It was a waste of time. There's nothing related to the central question of Russian interference. Meanwhile, the anti Trumpers will look at exactly the same report and they will report and conclude that it was a damning report that shows that the President did everything he was accused of doing, but for whatever reason, blah, blah, blah, they can't put him in jail. So I think there's no chance that it can go any other way. It will give you both worlds simultaneously and they will just stay there. We will perpetually have two completely different views of the world and people will be locked into them and they won't have to solve. One of them will not have to disappear in favor of the other. So that's my prediction. Now, I've got a question about the way the anti Trumpers are talking about Russia. So the most common statement about Russia is that we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were trying to influence the election and that they were trying to influence it in favor of Trump winning. But here are some questions that are outstanding for me. Number one. Well, let's look at the evidence. So one part of the evidence was that they ran ads on social media that were pro Trump. This we believe to be true. I don't think anybody's doubting that. But here's the problem. They also ran ads. The same group of people who ran ads for Trump ran ads in favor of Hillary. Were they cleverly trying to hide their pro Trump focus by running ads that were also pro Hillary? How do we explain that it was the same group of people? Did some of them get the wrong memo? Oh, my God, you're a bad employee. We told you to make pro Trump ads. Why did you accidentally make pro Hillary ads? Okay, that doesn't make sense, does it? And these are the facts that are not in question. We know for sure that they made ads pro Hillary. I don't think that's in question. Right. We've actually seen them. So the first part of evidence that the trolls were pro Trump seems to be violated by the evidence that we have. So a better interpretation would be that they were trying to sow chaos and get the country battling each other. The next thing is the. You'll often hear, well, Don Jr. Went to that meeting, that meeting didn't have any information. The Russians didn't have anything. So there was no collusion. There was no possibility of collusion. So they're trying to connect that Don Jr might have wanted to hear some information that would be helpful to Russian collusion. And it's a real stretch because if somebody tells me, hey, if you walk downstairs, literally it was in the building he worked in, I believe that's true. That meeting with the Russian lawyer was in his own building. If you walk downstairs, you might hear some stuff that's bad about Hillary that could be useful. Of course, you take that meeting. Anybody who doesn't take that meeting is an idiot. Now, if it turns out that something comes out of that meeting that the FBI needs to know about, that's a second decision. But you definitely take the meeting. So conflating that with these ads is weird. And then there's the whole Russia hacked the dnc. Now, here's the problem with the Russia hacked the dnc, and therefore they must have been pro Trump. Don't you think they would have hacked the Republican Party, too, if they could have? Isn't the only thing that stopped them from hacking both sides, that one side had better security? There is no evidence that they only wanted to hack one side. There's only evidence that they only could hack one side. That's completely different than evidence they only wanted to hack one side. So it's being reported by all the smart people that the evidence is clear and unambiguous that Russia was trying to influence the election. That part's true. The second part, that they were trying to do it to get Trump elected, that's really not in evidence. What is in evidence is that they were meddling. That part we can be pretty sure about. So every time I see it reported as fact that they were trying to get Trump elected, I look at all the individual pieces of evidence and say I don't see it. The facts that are in evidence don't indicate that at all. They do indicate that Russians may want to mess with us and create dissent. Now, what about how do you score this? Let's say you're Vladimir Putin and you know that President Hillary Clinton is the worst thing that could happen to the world. Let's say you think that President Hillary Clinton would be bad for Russia, but also bad for the United States, just bad for everybody, because she was going to cause trouble and destabilize things. Is it the same as saying that you're pro Trump to say that you're anti Hillary Clinton? Would Russia have put the same amount of effort into absolutely anybody who wasn't Hillary Clinton? And my guess is, since there's some suggestion that they hated her more than other people, that Trump just happened to be the candidate. Had it been any other candidate, wouldn't they have tried just as hard or wanted just as much that the President of the United States be anybody but Hillary, which is really different from trying to get Trump elected? Those are not the same. Anybody but Hillary is different than. Let's get Trump in there. He's our guy. Very different. And sure enough, we're seeing that Trump is putting more pressure on Russia than anybody ever has before. So that's consistent. All right. I'm going to keep it short today and there's not much going on. There's a whole bunch of Khashoggi stuff. The news, all of the Khashoggi stuff, just feels like another way to attack Trump. It doesn't feel as important as it ought to be. So we'll see how that plays out. Anyway, I'll give you more information about Utah at another time. I gotta go do some stuff and I will talk to you later.
