Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2872 CWSA 06/18/25

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underground, especially after dropping six of those mother of all bombs on it? I don't know. So suddenly my confidence that all you need is the US to say yes and those facilities will go away, I'm not so sure. I feel like the US involvement would be maybe we could destroy them, maybe we couldn't. So it might be worse if we try and fail. Because that would also tell them exactly how deep they have…

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y to make the decisions and that we would trust whatever Trump does to be America first. That's not a bad opinion. But Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and some other notable people, comic Dave Smith, are very much don't get militarily involved.

Now I criticize them not because I disagree but because I think their opinions are incomplete. They need to tell us what they think it would look like if we allowed the nuclear facilities to remain and didn't get involved. Now, I don't have an opinion. I'm just observing and predicting, but I do note that the people who pretend they do have an opinion, they're incomplete. You need to say, "I want to walk away and not be involved, and I want Iran to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities while they're way more mad at us than they were before." If that's your opinion, then you should proudly put it out there. But it's not really enough just to say we've been wrong every time we tried to do regime change or nation building because this is a little bit less than that. It's very specific to get rid of the nuclear and the missile programs. So I don't know if that's enough difference.

I do respect those opinions by the way. I do respect the opinion that says every time we've tried to do this has been a disaster. That's not crazy. It's hard for me to think of a counterexample where we got all involved militarily in the Middle East and everything worked out great. Does that ever happen? It feels like it's just this sticky, horrible situation that no matter what you do is bad, so you might as well not do anything. So I get it. I understand their point.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group is trying to limit Trump's ability to make war. So Thomas Massie said this is not a war and reminds us that the Constitution does not make it a Trump one-man show. And Tim Kaine, Democrat, is on the same team that he wants Congress to decide if we go to war. And Lindsey Graham is on the other side saying that we should be flying with Israel if necessary. In other words, if Iran doesn't give Israel and the US everything we want, he thinks we should go in hard militarily. Who's right? I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know who's right because it depends a lot on the implementation. If it were true that one bunker buster a piece would solve the whole nuclear program question, if that were true that would be a reasonable argument that you should go ahead and do it. But as soon as you say we might need six a piece it just doesn't sound doable to me even with our technology. So in that case it's hard to know what would work out.

Meanwhile, Iran is asking its people to delete the WhatsApp app from their devices because I'm sure the Iranians are at this point wondering how is Israel finding us so easily and killing all our generals? Is it because they're trying to communicate on WhatsApp? Well, do you believe that the US and/or Israel is reading WhatsApp messages out of Iran? Do you think that's happening? Here's what it says. This is from the corporate WhatsApp. Quote, we, and now listen to how specific this is. So my question would be, are they denying that the US and/or Israel have a back door? Are they denying?

WhatsApp says we do not track your precise location. We don't keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the personal messages people are sending one another. And we do not provide bulk information to any government. Does that seem to you like being a little bit too specific about what they don't do? And was there anywhere in that where it said we don't provide a backdoor to the United States CIA, which of course the United States would require, right? Is there any chance that the CIA doesn't have a backdoor to all of the messaging platforms? Is t

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here really any chance of that? I would say no. But I look at WhatsApp's denial. And now you know what you're looking for. So they're not denying that there's a back door. Here's what they're denying. We don't track your precise location. May be true. But do they track anybody else's precise location? I believe they don't track mine, but they're not interested. Does that mean they couldn't if the…

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