Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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MainContent Cognitive Reframing

Back to episode — Episode 2291 Scott Adams - CWSA 11/13/23, Reframing The News So You Can Use It

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days he would start out with his inspirational story about how anybody can make it in America. You know, like a real classic American success story kind of thing. And to many Republicans he looked like the antidote to the racial wokeness. It's like, oh yeah, that's it. You did all the right things and then you got a good outcome. And indeed we see over and over again that pretty much everybody who…

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rself a new congressperson. So I guess I love the justice. And just, I don't know, every part of that story I like. It's just it's kind of classically wonderfully American. So I guess that's what I like about it.

The Wall Street Journal has this big article about black voters moving a little bit more toward Trump. But just hold this in your mind. It's the Wall Street Journal, okay? Hold that in your mind. First, so it's one of the most capable, trusted news publications. Keep in mind that it's 2023, and in 2023 the Wall Street Journal has an article which makes the claim that the fine people hoax was not a hoax. I mean, they don't say that. They just refer to the president calling people on both sides fine people like it was a fact in the Wall Street Journal in a major article, feature article, in 2023 in the Wall Street Journal. Now this was Catherine Lucey wrote this. And so I was so curious how you could be so either wrong or unethical. I didn't know what was going on. So I checked her background. She used to work for the AP during the 2016 election. If you work for the AP during the 2016 election, you were brainwashed into thinking that the fine people hoax wasn't a hoax, 'cause I think the AP reported that it was real. And then she goes to the Washington — I'm sorry, she goes to the Wall Street Journal, writes a feature article, and the editors of the Wall Street Journal don't catch that it was a pretty important part of the story. I mean, it was important context of the larger story. What's going on here? Because that's not an opinion. That's a well-established fact that it didn't happen in 2017. You could be maybe excused for not knowing that the fake news was fake, but it's 2023. You telling me that nobody who read this article before it got published was aware that they were perpetrating one of the biggest lies of American politics? Wall Street Journal doesn't know that? Really? What do you think is going on? I actually don't know. Do you think that both the writer and whoever edited it couldn't catch it? And do you think that after it was published they didn't get enough pushback to immediately correct it? I'm actually puzzled.

Here's a challenge. Can you find me if the Wall Street Journal has ever reported factually that the fine people hoax was a hoax? 'Cause I'll bet they have. I feel like I have a memory that the Wall Street Journal is one of the few that correctly said that didn't happen. So I'm wondering if their reporting is now two opposites. Is that what happened? Whereas the Wall Street Journal always imagined that it happened? Have they always reported it wrong? I'd love to know what's going on there anyway.

Here's a little test for your relatives for Thanksgiving. I like before the holidays I like to give you something to say to your relatives that are on the left that will get them all worked up. Just to ruin all of your family relations for fun. All right, here's the test for cognitive dissonance. You want to ask if they agree with the following logic. So you tell them it's a logic question. Do you agree with the following logic? That Attorney General Bill Barr and other advisers told Trump the 2020 election was fair and therefore Trump knew the election was not rigged. So ask them if they agree with that. If they agree with that, that's cognitive dissonance. Right now some of you are saying, but why is that cognitive dissonance? If you're saying that, you're having cognitive dissonance. Because everybody who doesn't have cognitive dissonance knows immediately what's wrong with it. And it's not because some people are good at logic and some people are not. This is something everybody knows, right?

Let me give you an example. If you can't find your phone and the only place you look is in your bedroom, can you conclude that no phone exists? Everybody knows that that would not be logical. There's nobody who needs a logic lesson to know that if the only place you looked and you didn't find it, you could not conclude that it does not exist anywhere e

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lse on Earth. We all know that. Now there's a special case where if I ask you is there milk in the refrigerator and you looked and there was one container and you look and it's empty and then you look really carefully in the rest of the refrigerator and there's no other milk, yes, in that very weird specific case you can know there's no milk in the refrigerator. But you know that's a very special…

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