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

Context —

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…

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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 the risk reward here might be that well you just have to do it anyway.

So what could it mean to be designated a terrorist organization? I'll give you some suggestions. One thing is it could change the sentencing. So I would argue that if somebody is responsible for the deaths of 10,000 Black Americans you should be considering the death penalty or at the very least life in prison. So I would think that for Antifa given that they're destroying the lives of tens of thousands of people and that they're literally an anti-America treasonous group that something like the death sentence or life in prison would be appropriate. Now I don't think any of these things are going to happen. I'm just, this is just brainstorming.

What about banning phones at protests? Now you can't really ban a phone but you could turn them off. You could track them. What about tracking them? Let me ask you this. I would say that I have a security interest as an American. I have a security interest in knowing who the Antifa people were or indeed knowing who was at the protest in general because I would like to keep them away from me because they would be dangerous to me. I think it's a fair statement to say that anybody who attended the protests, not anybody that's too much, but that the average person who attended the protest would be physically dangerous to me because they might perceive me to be part of the problem. So don't I have an interest in knowing where they are and who they are? The same as I have an interest in knowing where a pedophile lives. If you can publish the address and name of a pedophile because there's something special about that crime that means that if there's something special about some other crime the door is open. So we have a precedent that in unusual circumstances the public has such an interest to know that you can violate the privacy of especially bad people such as pedophiles because the public health interest is just that great.

Now since I'm literally at risk and so are many of you from even being in the same room as somebody from Antifa it's sort of risky at this point. Don't I have a citizen's right to know who they are and where they are and to avoid hiring them? Imagine if you accidentally hired somebody from Antifa and you didn't know it. Well that's not good for your business is it? Might not even be good for your health. So I would say that given that we know the government is tracking all of our phones all the time shouldn't I have a right? Again I'm just brainstorming here. Every idea I toss out I'm well aware that the unintended consequences might be larger than the problem so you don't need to tell me these are good ideas or bad ideas. We're just brainstorming.

So just brainstorming some more. Suppose we just made a list of everybody whose phone was at the protests which would be pretty much everybody because I don't think too many people were there without phones. So shouldn't I always be able to look at the list? Let's say I'm going to hire somebody. Shouldn't I be able to check them against the list of people who attended? Now I could ask questions and say why did you attend? They might say I was shocked by the murder of a Black man. I just wanted to show my participation. And you might say good enough. I agree with that. You're on board. Maybe. It may be up to you. But I do think that the employer is owed that information for health and safety reasons because I think you could identify somebody who's actually Antifa if you're talking to them. It probably isn't that hard to identify Antifa if you're looking for it you know if you know what to look for. So I would just put that out there. The phones of all the people at the protests we could easily identify where they were and when.

Now you could also do it a clever way which is you could say there's a public health information because there's a public health need because of coronavirus. Would you not like to know if you're coming in physical contact with anybody who came in physical contact with thousands of protesters? Yeah I think you have a legitimate right to know if somebody intentionally put themselves in a highly infectious situation for your own health. I think you have a right to know that.

Is it likely that any of these things will happen? I'd say no not likely at all. What if domestic terrorists lose their right to privacy just the way foreign terrorists do? Foreign terrorists don't have any American privacy rights but suppose domestic terrorists just for you know a mental experiment suppose they lost their rights of privacy as well. Their phones were tracked. Their social media was tracked et cetera. Would that happen? I don't know. Just brainstorming.

Suppose we did to domestic terrorists the same thing we do to foreign terrorists which is disrupt their economic network. There are literally GoFundMe accounts for terrorists. What? That's right there are public GoFundMe accounts for Antifa who are domestic terrorists. Why do we allow that? So certainly there's something we could do with the finances, something with the penalties, something with privacy and identification. I don't think any of them will be identified. If you could identify them certainly employers know not to hire them so that's pretty bad.

Now I would say that the news business is I think violating a public trust and this is both the left and the right. I think both the left and right are violating a public trust by not reporting that the true statistics of crime so that they sort of let it stay out there that the Black people are killed at a higher rate by cops. Allowing that to be believed by the public is such an abrogation of responsibility that I would think the FTC could pull their licenses or the FCC or whatever. Whoever. There must be somebody who could pull some kind of a license for that kind of bad behavior because the public is required to know that these protesters are dangerous both in terms of virus and in terms of just being around them. They're terrorists and the people who march with them of course are supportive of terrorists by definition. They don't have to mean they're supportive. Doesn't mean their intention is to be supportive but they are and they made that choice.

So where, and I said it before, where are my data projections? We've got a million estimates for what's going to happen with global warming. We saw all these estimates of who's going to die from the coronavirus. We have estimates and data and graphs for every freaking thing under the sun. The only one that matters today, the only one that matters, is this graph of how many Black people Antifa are killing. Because if the news were reporting that fact or even just talking about the question, imagine that CNN had a panel discussion and let's say it got picked up by the other news and the discussion went like this. Well we've run the numbers and we you know there's some dispute about the estimates because there always are but in general terms it looks like Antifa will kill tens of thousands of Black Americans through their destruction of economic resources and of course make racism much much worse. I mean you can measure that with polls. So where's that? And then of course these people will never get jobs once they're identified and eventually we'll be able to identify them all one way or the other. Where's the news reporting those basic facts? Because those are the basic facts that would reduce the temperature and help things because it would discourage people from continuing to do these things but the news is kind of

Context —

actively encouraging it I would say. Yeah Larry Elder has been one of the probably one of the only honest voices in this whole situation because he's a Black man and he's a conservative so he's capable. You know he's got this sort of a safe position where he can say things that are true. I think we've come to the point that the only people who can tell the truth in public are Black conservatives.…

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