Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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m see what happens but do a small, see if finding out if it works. But here's my issue with the Black Lives Matter protest over police killing. Police killing might be not, might be, probably is not, probably is absolutely is, I'm going to go for full certainty on this, the smallest problem in the Black community. It's the smallest problem. Why are they protesting over their smallest problem? The…

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e only way. So the Black population has by, and I think that the illegitimate press is largely to blame for this. Imagine a world in which the protests were happening just the way they're happening now but if you turned on CNN they would say you know this is actually your smallest problem statistically. If you're just to look at the numbers this is by far your smallest problem because all of the crime etc. is coming from the same one thing you know bad education. There's questions about family structure etc. which I don't fully understand what's behind all of that. I've got some real questions there about what is actually exactly behind the number of single parents etc. I'd like to know more about that. But anyway if the news accurately reported things in the size that they should be reported the protest wouldn't be happening because every time they turned on the news they'd be watching their own news source and their own news source would say okay they're working on the smallest problem and ignoring the big ones again. And then all the protesters would say well that's not any fun. Why are we out here working on our smallest problems again? Did you know this was our smallest problem? You didn't know either? Okay but now we know because it's on both the left and the right news sources which is usually more dependable if it's reported both ways.

So in my opinion the protests and all that come with it including the extra coronavirus if in fact there is any that comes out of it is entirely the illegitimate press's problem. When I told you that non-fiction writers are the biggest risk to the country I mean this. This is all non-fiction writers who are writing fiction ironically. The news business is just non-fiction writers. That's what they do. They write about non-fiction and if they wrote correctly and if they were good at their job in other words if their talent stack included the ability to look at data they would not be putting us in this position. Do you know what they'd be doing? Supporting things that would give Black people a better education right? Because that would be the top priority. Not even close. Not even close to any of this other stuff.

All right. We found out recently that Mark Levin, you know him from Fox News and he's got a radio show I believe and other things, and apparently a former Wikipedia editor. And if you know the model of Wikipedia you have all these volunteer editors. So for every topic you could have multiple editors who have been sort of approved I guess to be able to change things. But the editors can get in battles. So somebody could change something and then another editor can come in and change it back. But they do have rules about what is right to change and what is not right to change. And one of the rules is if you point to a source then you can keep it in there. Like you don't want to remove something that has a legitimate source. But if you put something in there that's a claim without a source then another editor can successfully get rid of that.

But apparently there was this huge battle over Mark Levin's page in which somebody kept filling it with untruths and the other editors would try as hard as they can to scrub it out but I guess it was just like a raging multi-year battle in which somebody continued to put smears on there and other people continued to try to get rid of them. I don't know where it ended up. I'm not sure if it's back to the smear or back to gone.

All right. There's a tweet that says that from Dr. Cal Vander, Dr. Cower I think I'm pronouncing it right, K-A-U-R, tweeted that there are 53 plus published hydroxychloroquine studies for COVID-19 showing strong efficacy as a prophylaxis and as treatment in early COVID. So that's the claim. The claim that there are 53 plus published studies showing that hydroxychloroquine works and that the government is sort of blocking it from being used.

And then on top of that Dr. Zelenko who most of you know he was the doctor who is using hydroxychloroquine with all of his patients in New York and claimed a much better rate of recovery than other people like much, much better. So he's one of the leading proponents of hydroxychloroquine.

Now here the first thing you need to know is in my understanding there is no gold standard test of this drug yet. So you can fact check me on that but I don't believe there is any controlled clinical gold standard study using it as a prophylaxis. But there do seem to be studies showing that if you give it to people when they're almost ready to die it doesn't help much. So we've seen those. As someone suggested and I think I have to agree it has the look of intentional failure. The studies on hydroxychloroquine look to the untrained eye just an observer looking on like they were designed to fail. Because from day one the potential of the drug was always about giving it to you early. That was always the claim. But what got tested first is giving people toxic doses more than you would ever give somebody when they were at the end of their life and it was just too late.

Now if you were going to design a study to test the claim that a drug given early as a preventative, prophylaxis or at least to catch things early, if you were going to test that claim would you do it by a toxic dose given to people who are near death? You wouldn't. But suppose you were a big drug company and you wanted to make sure that people did not think hydroxychloroquine would work. What kind of study would you fund if you wanted the public to think hydroxychloroquine which is cheap and widely available is not the way to go? Well if I were a drug company I would immediately fund a trial that I knew wouldn't work and it would look exactly like the trials that we saw.

Now this is not, I'm not claiming that's wha

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t happened. I don't have any information that would suggest that that happened but I'm saying that if you're looking at it from the outside and you're even a little bit objective it looks like, doesn't mean it happened, looks like it was designed to get you the wrong result. I know what a trial would look like if somebody's trying to get an accurate good useful result and it's the opposite of that…

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