Back to episode — Episode 600 Scott Adams - Let’s Discuss a Tweet Because Everything Else Seems to be Fine
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Now if I told you, yes I have many times, that's a way to evaluate your filter online. Let's say you're looking at the world one way and interpreting it one way. Somebody else is looking at it another way. Whether it's this presidential tweet, some people say, "My God, it's a racist outrage," and other people, "It's just trash talk." Two very different filters. One of the things that you can do to…
← Previous segment →Let's take a little deeper into this whole "go back home" tweet. You all know the background. I don't need to give you the background. We're talking about President Trump's tweet that's causing everybody's hair to be on fire. So here, let me show you some of the craziness that this has caused. Over at CNN, where opinion and news are treated as the same thing, and I say that because CNN doesn't do a good job of separating what is opinion from what is news. They sort of smush it together so the viewer doesn't quite know what has been presented as a fact and what is just somebody's interpretation. Fox News, by anybody's measure, has lots of different opinions, and some of them you don't agree with, but they do a lot better job of labeling opinion. You know that Hannity's opinion, right? You know that Tucker's an opinion show.
But listen to this smushing. This is an analysis by Stefan Collinson. Now it's presented not as opinion. It's actually labeled on the CNN site as "analysis." Now you're just a dumb American and you're reading some stuff on the CNN news site. If it says "opinion," what do you think of it? You think, okay, well it's not necessarily fact, it's opinion. If it's labeled "analysis," what are you, the dumb American, think? They're doing analysis. Doesn't really sound like opinion, does it? I mean, I think that it allows it to be opinion-y. I think it does allow that. But the word seems to be chosen to blur the difference between opinion and fact.
So here's what Stefan Collinson's analysis says. He says, this is just part of it, "In the twilight zone of the White House, the man who unleashed the fury, Trump expressed disgust at the vile, horrible statements said by the woman he targeted over the color of their skin." So on a CNN site labeled "analysis," they slip in this unsupported statement: "he targeted over the color of their skin." At what point did the president target somebody over the color of their skin? It's presented like, well that's obvious, you know that, there's no point in supporting this fact, everybody can see it. That's not an evidence.
Do you know who else President Trump told to go back home? The British ambassador. Correct me if I'm wrong. Did he not send the British ambassador packing and call him stupid? Come on, it just happened. He just told the British ambassador to go back home. He didn't use those words, but is that the important part? He told him. He said he was stupid, incompetent, had never met him, and why he probably met him but didn't even know who he was. He told him to go back home. Yeah, the British ambassador. Did anybody say that the president is prejudiced against British people? No.
So to me, what Stefan Collinson did here by putting this sentence in his analysis, "said by the women he targeted over the color of their skin," to me that's a racist statement, isn't it? And my point being that if all you're doing is talking about whether or not somebody acted about race, and the frame is race and everything's race and race race race, isn't that making things worse?
You know the president has expressly said that if you're in the United States, he's going to be your best friend. If you're a citizen of the country, he's going to be your best friend and supporter and cheerleader. And if you're not, you're on the other team and he doesn't hate you but he's going to compete against you and make sure that his team does better than the other teams. Now that's the frame that he's continually and clearly put on all of his political actions. The critics continually and expressly, this is not an interpretation of mine, they continually frame things as racial issues. There's no way that isn't the race-ist. There's no way.
Now the Republicans don't make a big deal of calling the other side racist because it's just not their deal. But we have certainly reached the point where a hundred percent of us are racist. We actually have a situation yesterday, I tweeted about it, I think I had 5,000 retweets on it, and I said that the breaking news, the racist press is reporting to the racist public that racist Pelosi is accusing racist Trump of saying bad things about the racist four congresswomen. There's nobody in that story who hasn't been accused of racism. A hundred percent of all the people in the news have now been accused of racism. There's nobody left. There's nobody left.
I'm going to drink some black coffee right now and just try to experience the whatever this is, the cognitive dissonance we're all experiencing. And I drink this coffee, this black coffee, as a salute to the black citizens of this country who we support 100%. I'll drink to that.
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To that point, let me ask you this hypothetically. You're a black citizen of the United States. You've got two friends. One of your friends is a registered Democrat. One of your friends is a registered Republican. Which one's going to help you get a job? Which one's going to do you a favor? Well, maybe both. But I'll tell you, have you ever met anybody who, let's say an African American who became…
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