Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #2852 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2852 CWSA 05/27/25

Context —

magine is that we were complicit and something about the Trump administration has decided not to be complicit. I don't know. There's something to be learned by that story, but whatever it is, it's not good, but it's probably good now. Anyway, there's a story in the New York Times that is just full of anonymous sources. Oh man, they got some anonymous sources. And I saw Greta Van Susteren was mock…

← Previous segment →

hat easily make the person who is the real subject believe whatever the other people all believe is true. So it's so easy to change a person's perception until they don't see something or they do see something that just isn't there. Now, this is a very repeatable experiment in psychology and you've probably seen it a million times in the real world.

So here's my take. For sure, no doubt about it, there were people in the news business who were aware that Biden's brain wasn't working and that it was a big problem. There's no doubt about it. I don't know if Jake Tapper was one, but maybe. But if you have enough people who were pretending that he's perfectly fine, and there certainly were enough people pretending that, then you can guarantee that some number of people were just sort of hypnotized into believing it was true because when they looked at the other people, they weren't seeing anything. That's a problem.

So my guess is that it was always a combination. It was a combination of people who knew they were lying and just were trying to prevent Hitler from coming into office, you know, in their view, some people who just preferred the Democrats to win, you know, that would be the Democrats, and some people who had the ability to know but that ability was sort of shut off by the fact they were put in an environment where it seemed like nobody else noticed. In theory, they would be cognitively blinded to the obvious. So I think you have to be a little bit careful about assuming that every single person was aware and knew it because you could see it, because if you were not in that environment then you would not have been influenced by it and you could just see it clearly. Right?

If your experience was turning on my podcast every morning and listening to me say since maybe 2017 or something like that, saying, "No, Bi

Context —

den's brain is completely broken. He's obviously incompetent." If you were listening to me say it every day, you would be completely immune from the cognitive blindness because you would have at least one person and probably lots more who are telling you the truth. So you wouldn't have that problem. But when you look at the Democrats, they would definitely have that problem of being cognitively bl…

Next segment → →