Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 1014 Scott Adams - The Strategy of the Protestors and Where it is Heading

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it being that it's the most important thing in the news. Huh. Well I guess I'll have to look that up. I'm not going to say any more about it until I confirm it's true. So somebody says Newsweek is reporting it, NBC and Wall Street Journal. Okay so it's not headline news is it? Are you seeing anybody reporting as a headline or is everybody reporting it as somewhere down in a long story? It's just…

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hat are the odds that George Floyd coincidentally died just by coincidence at exactly the same time he was being strangled by a cop? And so your common sense says well let me do the odds. The odds of somebody dying by coincidence exactly at the same time they're being strangled is about zero. So therefore it was the strangulation, the knee, that killed him. Common sense, logic, smart people follow the odds.

Then we find out he had fentanyl in his system. Now not all of you are fentanyl experts. I unfortunately know a lot about fentanyl because my stepson died with it in his system. One of the things I know is that fentanyl makes it difficult to breathe as does meth I believe. And I'm not sure about the meth but fentanyl does. So fentanyl will make you have difficulty breathing. Now if you have difficulty breathing and I heard this from some experts, if you're a fentanyl user, let's say you're a junkie, an addict, you have learned that if you were to fall asleep on fentanyl and your head goes down you might constrict your own breathing and not wake up. In other words you'll just asphyxiate yourself by just falling asleep because your neck's in the wrong position. Now if you were simply drunk and you fell asleep with your neck in the wrong position you would do something like this and you would just wake up. So the difference between being on fentanyl and being just inebriated with some other drug is that if you're inebriated with another drug and your breathing gets cut off it kind of wakes you up so it doesn't kill you. On fentanyl you don't wake up. You just don't breathe. You just don't breathe and then you die because you're not breathing.

So the responsibility of the police is to be smarter than us. The responsibility of the police of course is to be smarter than the public and the public would not know that if somebody had maybe fentanyl in them. And remember the police would assume that a great many people that they stop who have symptoms of being under the influence, the police would know that maybe half of them have fentanyl. The percentage of people who look like they're in that condition who have fentanyl in them is very high. I think maybe half at this point. So if you're a police officer you knew there was maybe a 50 percent chance he had some fentanyl in him even if he had other stuff too. You knew the fentanyl was a breathing issue. You would be concerned about what position you put the perpetrator in because it might exacerbate the breathing issue and you certainly wouldn't want to put your knee on a neck for somebody who had a breathing issue, right? And you wouldn't want to be on their back etc.

But it turns out that we learned today according to the reporting of CNN that the police officers were having a conversation about, and if you haven't heard this it's the biggest news of the day, the police officers, it was reported I think by witnesses, that they had a conversation while they had him down about how to keep him alive and specifically mentioned the risk of sudden death from being in the wrong physical position and being in a certain drug state. Did you hear that? The police who had George Floyd down and were on top of him, the three of them had a conversation which was witnessed in which they talked about making sure he didn't die accidentally by being in the wrong position and being in a drug state. And there's actually a name for it which they used. So in other words the police were medically aware that the perpetrator's position and his drug state was a risk for sudden death and they talked about how to prevent it. And the one who's been charged said he's the one who won the conversation and he said that's why he's on his stomach. In other words he was on his stomach specifically to prevent, and they said it out loud, specifically to prevent accidental sudden death.

Now I see you screaming in the comments nine minutes but he kept his leg up there nine minutes. Now I'm with you. What I watched looked like a crime. What you and I watched looked like a crime and until there's a trial I'm going to assume that there was a crime. But if you think that the guys on the back could tell what was going on, you know if, let me put it this way, if the intentions of the police officers are part of the charge, in other words you have to intentionally kill somebody to get murder one, I think that is disproved. So the evidence disproves intention. In fact the evidence proves that at least verbally they were negotiating on how best to keep him alive. So if there's evidence that these three cops were talking about how best to keep him alive and to prevent the very thing that happened, good luck with the conviction. I think you might get a conviction with the one who had his knee on the neck because you could certainly make the case that no matter what that was the wrong thing to do.

Now that what I've said is that even I as not an expert and not a cop even I knew that somebody who probably or at least had a high likelihood of having fentanyl in them, even I knew there would be a breathing issue so even I would not have taken the risk that those cops took. But would you have known that? How many of you would have known what the cops knew that there was a risk of sudden death in that exact situation? The cops said it out loud there was a risk of sudden death. Yeah I mean they use the technical word but that's what it is.

Somebody says they should have called for paramedics. I think there's plenty. Let me be as clear as I can. I would be amazed if the guy with his knee on the neck doesn't get charged with something that sticks. It just feels like there's got to be something in the way he did his job that was criminal because it looked like it. So I'm not trying to excuse him. I'm predicting that the three cops who were not charged, even when Ellison looked at it, now Ellison of course is the leftiest of the left. You know he's literally Antifa friendly. So Ellison is the attorney general and apparently he even said even Ellison said the other three cops it's going to be a problem because he's seen the evidence and I think he knows that they're not going to get convicted. The other three. The one probably.

So like coronavirus the odds of this being a two-wave problem with a second wave of rioting and looting is really high probably in the ninety percent range because the other three cops almost have almost no chance of being convicted in my opinion or if they get convicted it'll be some minor thing and I don't think that that will satisfy the bloodlust because there is a blood lust here right and people want revenge. They want, they just want revenge.

Now why is it that the Black community wants revenge? Well obviously it's because their lived experience backed up by lots of news reporting is that they're targeted by the police. Now the statistics as I understand them do not back that up. Does CNN report that it's simply not true that Black people are killed at a higher rate than white people during stops where let's say you both have weapons or you don't have weapons but you know apples to apples? Is CNN reporting that there actually is not a real problem that the riots are rioting over? In other words it's an imaginary problem in the sense that if you looked at the statistics it would just disappear. Now because we have the video it's not that part's not imaginary. That's the actual crime it looks like so you have to treat that one as a specific case. But how is CNN handling this? What are they doing to lower the temperature?

Well here's a sentence off of CNN's website. Now remember this is CNN trying to lower the temperature, make sure that the violence stays low. And here's what they say. Police officers are rarely charged with crimes for violence against Black men and even in those rare cases juries have repeatedly shown an unwillingness to convict. Now is that a true statement? I'm sure it is. Wouldn't you say this is a true statement? I mean I haven't seen the statistics but I'm guessing it's true. Sounds true. So let me read again from CNN. Police officers are rarely charged with crimes for violence against Black men. I'll bet that's true right? What'd they leave out?

Here's what I think they left out and they could have at least mentioned it if they wanted to give us good context. How often are the police successfully charged for violence against anyone? Anyone. Is it true that when police are charged with violence against Black Americans that the police are not charged for that but they are charged when they have violence against white Americans if the situations are somewhat? Is that what CNN is telling us? Because by leaving out it seems to me that they should have said just to complete the thought if they believed it was true they would have completed the thought and say police are rarely charged for hurting Black citizens but they're often charged for hurting other citizens. The reason they don't do the second part is because I don't think it's true. I think just police generally don't get charged with hurting people and I'm not even sure that's a big problem because the opposite would be even worse. If police could not do their job because they're too worried about being charged with hurting people I don't know if you'd have an effective police force. You'd probably get riots like you have today.

Here's what the police chief, I think it's the police chief who is responsible for the police officers who were charged, and he told CNN that the silence of the four officers involved in Floyd's death and their inaction made them quote complicit. So complicit you know in quotes. What does it mean to be complicit and is that a crime exactly? And if the crime is silence and inaction how do you square silence and inaction with the fact that it's reported that they were doing the opposite? They were actively saying should we turn him on his side, should we treat it differently, how can we keep him alive? That's the opposite of inaction. That's actually action in which they discussed the best option and in the end they did not find an option that worked.

Now let me complete a thought I realized I didn't complete earlier. Fentanyl in the system creates the possibility that the fentanyl killed him just by itself. There is a non-zero chance that he may have taken some if he had any drugs left over that he didn't want to be busted for. He may have put them in his mouth if he took the drugs he had with him so that he wouldn't be busted. It would be a high likelihood if any of that was fentanyl it would be highly likely that he would have an overdose at exactly that time. In other words while in custody. You know which didn't have to happen at that very moment but the odds of him dying while in custody were very high if, and this is just speculation, he took any drugs to avoid being caught with drugs. Now we don't know that that happened but because there was fentanyl in him that becomes a contributing factor.

So if you were the cop with the knee and you're his attorney how would you argue the case? Here's how I would argue it. I would say I knew that I was only putting enough pressure on him that you know it wouldn't kill him but I didn't know that under these special circumstances that he had these drugs in him. I didn't know that was an extra dangerous situation so it was an accident. I think that's what he'll argue but I think he'll probably lose and it'll be manslaughter anyway.

So we got that going on. Oh it's called excited delirium is what one of the police called it. He was worried. Also known as agitated delirium. Now the delirium part is related to being on drugs and it means that you become suddenly violent or could. So we now have evidence that the police were sort of doing a field diagnosis. You know they're not medically trained but they are trained to recognize situations so that they can do risk management. And one of the police officers was calling it out as maybe this excited delirium or agitated delirium which means that they were recognizing that although the guy seemed nominally not dangerous that it was the nature of his condition that could cause him to flip to dangerous very quickly. So that was actually discussed. And now you understand why three of them were holding him down because they suspected there was a high likelihood that he could turn from friendly to dangerous at a snap because of the condition they were observing. Not because of him or not because he was Black but because of the medical condition they observed. Their case is going to be a lot stronger than you want it to be I'll tell you.

All right so we have two battling autopsies which of course the fake news is reporting incorrectly. So the fake news is reporting that the family's autopsy, the one they paid to have done, shows that the cause of death is homicide whereas the other experts are, yeah I think in both cases it's homicide. Yeah I think in both cases it's homicide. But if you look at the autopsy report, the official one, it says cause of death homicide and then at the bottom it has a footnote that nobody's going to report. You know what the footnote says? The footnote says you should ignore that word homicide. That's what the footnote says. I'm paraphrasing but that's what it says. It says don't take homicide as homicide. It says that right on the same page. It says cause of death homicide and then just right down the page it says just to be clear homicide doesn't mean legally homicide. It just means there was a person involved in the guy died basically. There was another person involved. The actions of the other person you know were somehow implicated in the death. So in other words the coroner report does not say a crime happened and they're clear about that. They say it in direct language. This report does not determine that a crime occurred. It's very important. If CNN, I'll be amazed if CNN ever reports correctly.

Sorry I got a security alert while I was on live stream here but it was just a bird walking across my security camera. You know we live in the kind of time where I don't want to tell you that I'm afraid for my own life because you know my risk is actually pretty low but you know if I talk about things in public you know one worries that crazy people can find you or whatever but of course people like me are taking extra security precautions. So I have this thought in my mind of how that would go down and it doesn't go down well for other people. Let's just put it that way.

All right so we got the battling autopsies. We've got CNN who will probably never mention fentanyl or that its role in this whole thing which is pretty big in all likelihood. We don't know. Nothing is known about this. That's one thing.

All right let me ask you this. I predict, I estimate, so on back of the envelope an estimate, I would say that Antifa has killed more Black Americans or will kill more Black Americans in the coming decade than all of the police action put together. So that's my prediction. So my prediction is that Antifa given their contributions, the riots and the economic devastation which they're causing right now, my estimate is that Antifa if you were to do the math would be directly responsible for maybe I don't know tens of thousands of Black American deaths through the mechanism of extra poverty.

Imagine trying to be a young Black man in an urban place and asking for a job at any future retail organization. Good luck. Good luck. Because if the goal of the riots was to decrease racism of course the opposite happened of course because you know tragically the protesters are going to get very much of the opposite of what they were protesting for. So in the making it worse category this is sort of the world class most making it worse thing you could ever do.

Now I think a lot of the protesters are well intentioned. Even most, maybe most of the protesters are well intentioned. Certainly not the looters. Certainly not Antifa. But a lot of people are well intentioned. Still I think you could do a calculation to figure out how many Black Americans Antifa will kill over the next 10 years compared to the police and I don't think it'll be even close. I think the numbers would be, you know in rough numbers it's going to be something like tens of thousands of Black Americans will be killed by Antifa through poverty and maybe a few hundred over ten years would be killed by the police. So I think it's sort of a few hundred that the police are killing to maybe tens of thousands of Black Americans that Antifa are killing.

And that's not counting the fact that good luck getting a job because of what, you know even if the economy came back you know and if you go in for, let me ask you this. I put this poll up just before I went live so I can check the results and I'll ask you this. If you were an employer would you, and somebody came in for a job in the future and you saw in their social media history that they had participated in the protests in any fashion, in any fashion, it doesn't matter if they were peaceful, doesn't matter if you know they weren't, just in any fashion, would you hire them? Would you hire somebody who participated in the protests knowing that their participation was the shield for the looters and Antifa knowing that that was certainly going to do that? How many of you would hire somebody who had taken part in that? Because I would go on record as saying I would not. And I think that's important. I would never hire anybody who had participated in any fashion in the protest.

Now I might make an exception if it was the first night. You know if somebody came in for a job and said blah blah and I said well I've looked at your social media you were at those protests. If they were to argue to me whoa no no I went the first night. The first night it was really just a protest. It just devolved. I would take that into consideration and I would say oh okay so really if you saw how bad it was after the first night and you adjusted by not going the second night I could live with that because maybe that's a good person, good cause. I saw that it didn't work out, adjusted. Totally I could live with that. But if they went more than one night after we knew that the rioting was happening.

All right so here's the poll I did online. So of course this is not a scientific poll. I said would you hire someone whose social media history showed they were part of this week's riot looting protests? The people who said of course they're good people, three percent. Three percent of the people who answered this. Now of course these are mostly conservatives who answered I think. 79 said no why risk it and 18 said just show me the votes. So really if you get rid of the 18 percent who just wanted to see the results it was 79 to 3 in favor of they would not hire somebody whose social media history showed that they had been even an attendee, even just an attendee at the protests.

So why is the news not reporting that? Why do you have to hear that from me right? The news is no longer the news. The news is now some kind of social programming. You know the news is programming you. It's not just giving you news. So that's a pretty big story.

Now what does it mean to declare Antifa domestic terrorists? Well the funny part about it is that the Democrats have been suckered into supporting a terrorist organization publicly. So Kamala Harris is one of the people raising money for a group that has just been declared domestic terrorists. Now of course if you ask Kamala she'd say no I'm raising money for honest protesters who have a real cause but unfortunately she can't distinguish between who's getting bailed out, who's Antifa and who was a good person who was in the wrong place. So in a very real sense, not even in the political sense but in a real direct accurate factual sense, Kamala Harris is supporting domestic terrorists.

Now Trump has managed to be in a position where his opponents are supporting terrorists who are destroying the country. Do you think he can lose election at this point if things go the way they're going and Trump becomes the name that is associated with the coming crackdown because there has to be a crackdown eventually? He almost certainly will be elected in the biggest landslide in American history because how many Democrats are watching the carnage and watching their own lives being destroyed by their team? A lot. A lot of Democrats just watched their entire lives be destroyed by their own side and they also watched that none of the Republican cities seem to be even affected. It's hard to not notice. And it's hard to not notice that one team is supporting literally terrorists.

Now what do you do with this? I heard Andrew McCarthy say that there are enough laws on the books already that you don't need to define anybody as domestic terrorist. It doesn't have any meaning. But what meaning could it have? We could give it meaning. Congress can make new laws right? We know how to make laws. So let's say we gave it meaning. What kind of meaning? What kind of powers would you want to attribute to the domestic terrorist designatio

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n? Now of course the big risk is that once it's even allowed that you could call domestic people terrorists the moment you allow that you're open to abuse because then there might be some future group that's not so bad that gets declared terrorist organization because it's politically expedient. So you can see it would be opening Pandora's box. But we also might not have any choice. In other words…

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