Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
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point, given that we know there's no evidence of a crime, would everybody agree with that? Both the jury and the judge are completely aware there's no evidence of a crime. We all know that now because we saw the trial at this point. Do you know what the best thing to do would be? For the judge to declare, I don't know what the legal term would be, but just to cancel the trial. Here's why. If I we…

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cover what I'm saying? Summary dismissal. That might be exactly the thing, right? Summary, I guess that just means it's so weak a case it's ridiculous, right?

Somebody's going to paste the summary dismissal. Well, I see it in the context of a job. All right, I've only seen it in employment. What is summary dismissal by a lawyer? Okay, it would be responsive motion for summary judgment. Jury nullification. Now I wouldn't call it jury nullification. A directed verdict. Yeah, maybe that would be ballsy, wouldn't it? Imagine the judge, I don't know the legal details, is this even possible? But imagine him just doing a directed verdict and say, you know, I didn't see any evidence of a crime and I don't want the jurors to get hurt for this. I'm a judge. I'll take the hit for it. Dismissed. Dismissed for lack of evidence. So that's a thing, right? Just dismissed for lack of evidence. That would be the best. I feel like that would be the best outcome, don't you? Dismissed. Okay, now if it's dismissed, it could still be tried again, I think. That's the problem. But since there was no evidence, I don't know that it would be.

Here's your lesson on cognitive dissonance for the day, courtesy of Cenk. How do you say Cenk from The Young Turks? How do you pronounce his last name? Because I hate to botch people's names because it sounds like I'm being disrespectful. Oh, it's Cenk. It's not a sink. Oh, it's Cenk. Okay, well I got his first name wrong. Cenk Uygur. Okay, all right. With all due respect to Cenk, I did not mean to get his name wrong. And I think I've said his name wrong a bunch of times in the past, so I apologize.

Well, here's your lesson in cognitive dissonance. So I think The Young Turks were maybe anti-Rittenhouse when it all started, but they watched the trial and at least two of them, Cenk and Ana, have decided that they saw self-defense. So my first statement is good job, Cenk and Ana, for changing your opinions based on evidence. That's, I'm always impressed when people change their opinion based on data, based on evidence, because you think it's never going to happen, right? But then what happens? You're like, oh, somebody actually changed their mind based on data.

Well, that's not exactly what happened with Cenk. What he said in his tweet is that yeah, he sees the defense of self-defense being valid in this case, but he still thinks that Rittenhouse is not an angel in the sense that he quote came there, and this is a quote from Cenk, in hopes he could shoot someone. Where is that in evidence? Where's the evidence that Rittenhouse came there in hopes he could shoot someone? If you come with a medical kit and you stated to everybody that you're going to be defending some property, you're cleaning graffiti, which part of that indicates to Cenk that he came with the hopes to shoot someone? That seems like quite the opposite of all the evidence, isn't it?

Now again, no matter how much evidence there is, I can't read his mind any more than Cenk can. So I'm not going to read Rittenhouse's mind and say, oh, I see in there no bad intentions. I can't do that. But the other thing I can do is I looked into his mind and although all of his actions looked opposite, I can see that what he's secretly thinking is he'd like to shoot somebody. That's cognitive dissonance. If you have to rely on mind reading in public, your argument is gone. But you can't release it yet, so you sort of shift it to something that's adjacent to your argument that you can hold on to. But there wasn't anything adjacent to his argument he could hold on to either. So he didn't get anything. He just got a whiff, just shot the miss.

All right, so the bottom line here is that our government has turned against the people, is not defending us against China whatsoever. They're not helping us with fentanyl at all, not helping us protect the border at all. And they're putting Americans in jail to make an example, to make an example. As soon as you hear that any American is being put in jail to make an example, you should be done with your government. Because we don't do that. That's not the America I will stand for.

Now again, I get the distinction in the government versus the people. I love the people, right? So I'm very pro-American people, and I'm still completely pro the Republic. So I like the Republic. I like the people. I think America has done great things and will do more great things. But the government, current government, has to fail. They have to fall because they've gone too far. And everybody can see it now. You can see from the poll results everybody can see it. It's now really obvious. Americans are being hunted just to make a political point. Can't live in that country. So that's not going to stand. We won't have that. We will not be Australia. The Second Amendment exists for a reason. This is it.

Now I'm not saying use guns, of course. I'm saying that the government ultimately is going to do what you tell it to do. Why? Becau

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se the Second Amendment. I mean, not entirely because of that. You know, they want to keep their jobs and get good ratings and all that stuff too. But the people have complete power in this country. We're not Australia. In Australia the government has power over the people. Not here. Not here. Not ever. Not here. Not ever. In America the people control the government, and it's time to exert that c…

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