mazing.

So he's a mandatory follow because he shows you what's on the other side of the curtain. And you don't get that from everybody. I'll give you other mandatories as we go along here.

Here's a way to know if you are dumb. A lot of you have been wondering, am I dumb? Do you ever have that thought? Sometimes it might be the imposter effect. You're not really dumb but you worry that you are compared to other people. But one way to know you are dumb is if you hear an argument and the first thing you think is, oh, you love that person you're talking about. Why don't you just kiss them? Apparently you love them.

Okay, that if that's your response to an argument, you're kind of dumb. You're not really ready for talking in public. If you say, oh, Scott, you're defending the worst person. You're an apologist for the worst person. If that's your feeling, you're dumb. Because you can't, for some reason, you can't separate an argument which could be good or bad from the people who are making it. If you can't do that, you just probably shouldn't talk in public. Maybe that's not for you.

Have I set you up enough? All right, let's talk about Matt Gaetz. Because I refuse to be limited by dumb people not understanding that you can talk about people, you can talk about their situation, but you're not an apologist defending people. You're just not that person, right? Can we do that?

All right, I would like to know that the people who follow me are smart enough to separate an argument from people. If you can't do that, you're on the wrong livestream. So let's do that as these stories go.

And of course you all know the weird Matt Gaetz story. There's allegations of orgies with underage people with no evidence that we've seen to suggest any of that's true. But the longer you wait, don't you expect the evidence to come out? Big old story like this, you know more and more evidence is coming out. So it becomes a different story the longer you wait. It starts as one thing and now it's evolving and it has evolved to sort of a new thing. And that's what I'm going to describe right now.

Number one, Matt Gaetz has said from the beginning that any allegations that he was with a 17-year-old are just completely false. It just doesn't exist. But he's gone further to say that the accuser doesn't exist. That's pretty gutsy, isn't it? How many people accused of something like this would go so far as to say not only did I not do it but the accuser doesn't exist? Now that's a pretty big claim.

Later if you find out that the accuser does exist, you know, then there's a separate question of whether anything happened with that accuser similar to what was accused. But isn't that an unusual claim? Don't you think? Because if somebody knew that the accuser would exist, in other words if Matt Gaetz knew the person exists, wouldn't that be the worst defense to say that they don't even exist? Right? Unless it's true.

Put yourself in that position right now. We can't read his mind, okay, so we're not reading his mind. But put yourself in the position. You've been accused of something with an underage person, 17. Would you say, if you knew you'd been accused of that, would you say no, we did not do that thing. I know who you're talking about but certainly we didn't do that thing. That's very different from saying nobody exists, that they just don't exist. That's really different.

I don't know that you'd have to be pretty sure they don't exist, would you? Because for sure the simplest thing to prove is that a person exists. Am I wrong? Is there anything easier to prove than that a person exists? He's really — it's interesting, isn't it? Because what happens if they produce the person? He looks really, really bad. Would he put himself in a position? And it's obvious that he's thought about it and planned his defense, right? It's not like an off-the-cuff thing. He's saying this repeatedly and often: the person doesn't exist.

Now if that person ends up existing, that's going to completely change what I think about the situation and for you too, I would think. But at the moment, every day that goes by when we don't hear that the person exists — and by the way, I don't think the person would be still 17, right? A number of months have gone by since the accusations even began. So statistically speaking, it seems deeply unlikely that there's still a minor involved. At least today it would be somebody over 18.

So do you think that there is somebody deeply involved in some kind of a secret investigation who doesn't want to be known at this point? And the leaks don't produce that person. I don't know. There's something sketchy about the fact that the longer you wait, you don't find out. Now if tomorrow we hear the name of the person and the person exists, change everything, right? I'm just saying that every day that goes by you have to say, I'm starting to wonder if this person exists. That's the reasonable question.

Here's the other part that I haven't heard anybody say. There's this weird element of it where apparently the Gaetzes had involved the FBI before any of this broke. They had involved the FBI in what they believed was an extortion attempt. All right, so here's the key point: that the Gaetz father and son both believed that it was an extortion attempt, so much so that they got the law enforcement involved.

All right, now we've seen the documents. If you haven't seen them yet, they're in the news today. We see the documents and emails going back and forth between the two attorney types who were proposing to Gaetz senior that for 25 million dollars they could get this alleged captive back from Iran who may or may not exist, right? He may or may not be alive. We don't know. There's indication he's not alive. But these two people said they had indication he was alive. You and I don't know, so we don't know if that guy exists.

But imagine you're the Gaetzes and people approach you and say for 25 million dollars we can maybe get this hostage back that you think might not even be real. Okay, you're saying to yourself, I'm not even sure there's a real guy alive that could be saved. And if he is, why isn't the government doing it, right? So it's kind of sketchy, right? The government wouldn't do this. Are you saying that there's nobody in the government of the United States who would be interested in getting back this hostage? So right away it's sketchy, right?

Now you could argue, oh, the government tried or they don't care or they don't believe the story but it's true. So you could maybe come up with some stretch of a story that would say yeah, this is the way to do it. You wouldn't use the government. You would make some deal with a private citizen. I mean it doesn't pass the sniff test, right? But it does