Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2427 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2427 CWSA 03/28/24

Context —

do you like freedom? You like freedom, don't you? If you want freedom, Biden is your one. Because after he's done all of that, in a Janis Joplin kind of way, you'll finally be free. Because freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. They would take your candidate away. They will take your guns away. They will take your free speech away. They will take your access to accurate informatio…

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o it.

Now suppose you didn't want to give me any attention because I'm the Dilbert cartoonist and a conservative and they don't like that. So suppose you didn't want me to get any extra clicks. Well it's just a post. Wasn't that long. I mean it was a long thread but you know maybe it'd be a quarter of a page. They could just copy and paste it because that would be fair use. If you're talking about it you can publish it in whole. You knew that, right? There's no copyright problem. If you're doing a story about it you can just publish it in whole. You couldn't do it with a whole book but you can do it with something short.

So now you say to yourself but Scott they probably had a lot of things they didn't link to. Nope. It was an article in which every paragraph had a link to find out more about something in the paragraph. Every paragraph. There were like 12 links to external things. And yet a core part of the story was my post. No link.

Let me tell you why there was no link to it. Because they read it. Yeah, that the post is my highly viral post, maybe the most persuasive thing I've ever written and maybe the most persuasive thing that's ever been written. Big claim. Well that's called persuasion. I'm actually giving you a challenge. I don't think anything has ever been more persuasive because it was the sum of everything I've learned all my life put into one piece. And I didn't hold anything back. And it was about how DEI is basically a female strategy and that for men you just look pathetic if you say, "Hey, my discrimination held me back." If you're a man it just looks pathetic. I don't care if it's true. But it's true. I don't care. I got problems too. Why is your problem special?

But for a female strategy victimization can work. You can actually get things fixed by complaining. If men do it they can sometimes get things fixed but we don't respect them ever again. So it's not really a good tradeoff. So it's so persuasive in my personal opinion — and I think you'll agree — that that's the reason it's got 1.1 million views is because people agree. If you look at the comments they're unlike anything I've ever done. Most of the comments are something like, "It's the best thing you've ever done." Most of them. That's a weird thing because you don't get that comment on just a good post. It's very rare that most of the comments say it's the best thing you've ever done when you know I've written 50 books. So that's really special.

So it's so dangerous apparently that Yahoo News won't link to it. Now I'm going to tell you the real reason they don't link to it is just that it would destroy their entire narrative. That's why it's that dangerous. But I'm completely controlled because I'm siloed. I'm siloed not just that nobody wanders in accidentally and sees my stuff but even when there's a major entity, Yahoo News I would call a major news entity, even when they do a story about it they silo me by not — I'm the only thing they didn't link to.

Are you blown away by that or is that just because it's me that I'm blown away? Maybe I'm just too inside my own head here. Is that, does that tell you something that's like meaningful for the rest of you or am I just talking about myself? I can't tell. This might be just too much inside baseball anyway. I'll look at your comments about that.

Pennsylvania court ruled in favor of signature verification for mail-in voting. Why the hell is that a story? It's a story that the court ruled that you do the most basic thing to make sure the election is not rigged. What? Why in the world was that even important? Like we live in a world in which strengthening voter security is somehow controversial. That's controversial. Wow.

And then I saw an opinion piece by Jon Ralston from the Ralston Reports. Not familiar with them but apparently he wrote a column and he reposted it so we could see. And he says in the wake of the McDaniel hiring firing people seem to forget the issue here has no equivalent. So he's talking about the 2020 January 6 stuff has no equivalent. He said you deny the 2020 election you should be shunned. You can and should Trump you should be able to platform Trump backers. In other words MSNBC you know should be able to put a Trump backer on there but not an insurrectionist. Not an insurrectionist. That now that's too far. That's too far.

And the reason that he has this opinion is that he believes it's a fact that the election was not rigged. How can you be so brainwashed that you think it's possible to know who won an election? How does that even happen? That is strong brainwashing.

But imagine putting him in the room with me and he makes this claim that people like me should be shunned for imagining that this election was not perfectly fair. To which I would say to him, "How would you know if it was fair or it wasn't?" And he would say dumb things like the courts didn't find a problem. And I would say, "What school did you go to where you learn that not finding something by looking in the wrong place tells you that there's nothing there?"

So I would like to give a demonstration of proving that automobiles don't exist. Would you like to see it? I can prove it. Watch this. My proof that automobiles don't exist: I don't see any automobiles under my shirt. How about this drawer? Searching, searching. No automobiles. Proof there are no automobiles under my shirt. There are no automobiles in my desk drawer. QED there are no automobiles in existence. They're all imaginary.

Now is there something wrong with this individual's brain like organically they can't figure this out on their own or is this purely brainwashing? Now if it's brainwashing IQ is not a variable. This is one of the hardest things for people to understand. IQ and being smart and even being well informed won't help you from being brainwashed.

Do you think that when Patty Hearst was taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army and basically brainwashed, was it because she had a low IQ? She probably didn't. I mean I don't know anything about her but I doubt she was just sort of naturally dumb. No, there is absolutely no correlation between intelligence and how easily you can be hypnotized. In fact the evidence anecdotally for hypnotists is that it's easier to hypnotize a smart person because they let their guard down because they think they can't be hypnotized. That they just don't assume that it happens to them. They assume it's only something that happens to dumb people. So they don't have any defense. It just goes right through.

But do you think that Jon Ralston is aware that there is no mechanism and nobody's even tried to create a mechanism to know if an election is fair? That's unknowable by design. If it were paper ballots and every paper ballot was counted by both teams so there was a Democrat that counted every ballot at the same time a Republican counted every ballot, that would be I would say that I could call that election fair. Because it would be designed for me to acquire that information.

So if you say, "Scott do you think this is fair?" I say, "Well how did you do the election?" "Well it was all paper ballots. It was all same day. We checked all their IDs and then every single thing was counted by two people at the same time. And when they got to 10 they would check the count." "All right did you have eight Bidens and two Trumps?" "Yes." "Okay continue. Do the next 10." That way you're audited instantly. You're instantly audited because two teams got the same number and they stopped every 10 and then they went on, right?

So you could design a system where you would say to me, "I know it's really complicated and there's all these precincts and you can't watch them all and who knows but this was our system." If they told me that and I knew that was really the system I would say, "Yeah, yeah you know what I'm going to treat that as a fact because you built a system that would produce information to allow me to say it's a fact."

The current system produces nonsense. Nonsense. I can't even tell where the vote is. Wait is my vote in the ballot box or is it in the machine that created the paper? Are they counting the paper or is the machine count or are they comparing it? Then it goes into some kind of ballot counting machine, tabulator. What's that all about? Then where does the electronic signal go for any of that and how do they transmit it and what computers are involved and how many entities, how many state lines does it cross, how many international borders does it cross? What is the susceptibility to hacking? It's designed so you can't tell who won. It's pretty obvious.

Well when you imagine how easy it would be to design out all possibility of and then you look what we built instead, I think that removes all doubt, doesn't it? So to argue whether a vote was or was not rigged is the stupid argument I'm sorry. Because I know a lot of you make the argument it's obvious it was rigged. That's the dumb argument if only because you can't sell it. It's an unsellable argument. Nobody's buying it. So why do it?

But if you say to somebody look at the design. Look at what it could be then look what it is and look that we know we have a credibility problem. So it's not like we don't have a problem. And it's the biggest problem in the country and no effort whatsoever to fix it. There's only one conclusion, right?

You see how easy it is to fix things. You want to fix? Ron DeSantis shows you every day that he

Context —

can fix things that need to be fixed fairly efficiently. Yeah so it can be done. So don't be shunning those election deniers. Instead of being an election denier be an election system analyst. Am I an election denier? No I'm a system analyst and I found a system that can't tell you who won. That's it. You do not have an argument for that. This is a system that by its design can't tell you who won.…

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