Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #3056 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 3056 CWSA 12/28/25

Context —

story of the water leak that was fake that was just used as a cover to get the observers out. Now I could go on and on and on, but how many of you are having the same experience that in your bubble you have massive, just massive stories about very credible stories that various parts of the election were rigged? That's your bubble too, right? But I bet almost nobody on the left is exposed to this…

← Previous segment →

g as he maintains his bubble he probably can, or at least he'd have a shot at it. I'm going to vote against that being possible, but anything's possible.

All right, listen to this one. So as you know California got these billions of dollars that were supposed to be from the federal government that was supposed to be spent on the so-called high-speed rail project. As you know none of that got built after many years. As you also know nobody can account for where the money went. So the money just disappeared, i.e. got stolen, billions and billions of dollars. So if you were the governor or you were in charge in any way during that time, how do you explain where all the money went and then still become president? Because it's so obvious that there's either massive incompetence or just theft or both.

So here's what Newsom has proposed, that instead of cancelling the project because they don't have any money and they have no way to get that money back and it would cost five times more than they thought to build it, so there's no real possibility of building the thing they got funded for. There's just none. But instead of cancelling the project he's trying to extend it and make it a smaller project, something that you could imagine and probably only in your imagination they could actually build. And the reason that he would want to keep it alive is that if he builds nothing and he says I'm not going to build anything, he has to give back the money or at least he has to give back maybe what's left. So in order to not have to give back any money he's going to pretend that there's still a live project and it's just much smaller.

Holy, you know it's probably legal. It's more of a weasel legal thing to do. But how in the world can you do something like this and still become considered to be a presidential candidate? The only way is if people like me know about it. But I wasn't going to vote for him. And the people who might like him and might vote for him will never hear this story. They will never hear this story. And even if you brought it up and people heard it for the first time, let's say his competition brought it up at a debate or something, it's sort of technical and I'm not sure it would make any difference to a Democrat. And if he has some excuse like I don't know what they're talking about. We just need a train between these two places and we have the money. Why wouldn't we build it? So the Democrats could easily be convinced that there's no real problem here. And he would say, am I indicted for anything? No. Is it a crime? No. We're just doing things differently than Republicans would do them. There's no crime in that. So he could probably very easily dismiss it in a debate. The news will probably let him have a pass. And it's just unfreaking believable. Wow.

All right. Here's a story I've been watching for a while but now talking about. So Ilhan Omar, you all know her. Her husband allegedly, and she went from having no money at all to him having a company that's worth 30 million dollars. So first of all I don't know that the estimates of their net worth are accurate because numbers. But if you did not understand, and this is me, for most of my adult life I didn't understand why people who could clearly make more money in the private sector would want to be politicians because being a politician looks like a crappy job. I mean just the work looks crappy. And they really don't get paid enough to have a house in DC because they have to be there a lot but also maintain their home in the city they're representing or the state.

So I was always curious why in the world would you have so many people who would be willing to work at these bad jobs for years when after some point they could just put it on the resume and get excellent corporate jobs and stuff like that. And now I understand the real way you make money is that you as the politician figure out how to be part of the allocation of funds and you make sure that your husband or your spouse is somehow benefiting. So they might be in an NGO, they might be some private company that provides a service to the government, but suddenly the spouse of the politician is getting a lot of good luck. Isn't that good luck that you're in the business that can benefit from government contracts at the same time you're married to a politician? How lucky.

So I now suspect that although this would not explain every single person in politics, that a big part of it is that the spouse play that you could get away with because you make it look legal is why they do it. And then my next question is this. Since I don't know too much about the Department of Justice and how that works, at what point can you investigate somebody's spouse and the business that the spouse is in unless there's a really obvious crime? What if you only suspect there's a crime because somebody is doing unusually well in their job? You can't investigate that, right, in order to get a warrant or open up an investigation. Is it sufficient that it looks like they got money too fast or do you need to know, well they got money too fast and here's the criminal way in which it happened? So that's an open question. I just don't know the answer to that. But if we don't fix that I think we're in trouble.

Now in the context of finding out that everything is corrupt and all of our numbers are and everything's a scam, I saw a post by a data Republican who had this to say. Well let me just read it. So Data Republican said, I had this idea. What if autism diagnoses are partially from fraudulent billing? And then I poked around a bit and it turns out that the whole one in 30 statistic, that's one in 30 kids being born have autism today, which is an alarming number. What if the one in 30 statistic isn't based on official diagnosis? ADDM, I don't know what that is, has clinicians review school records and if the record fits then it counts as autism even if there's no medical diagnosis. Then that statistic is quoted to justify increased ABA centers, increased research, and all kinds of grants. And then Data Republican closes with, I'm questioning literally everything now.

All right. Now I do believe that it is reality that there's more autism. I think that RFK Jr. is right that there's probably something in our environment, something in our food, maybe something in our medicines, something somewhere that is causing more autism. So I do believe more autism is real. But how easy would it be to hide the fraud of claiming there's more autism than there is so that you could get funded for treating it? So now that we've seen the Somali healthcare scam and how easy it was for them to run the scam, is it possible that instead of one in 30, which would be super alarming, maybe it's one in 100? I don't know what the old number was, but it could be that there's a huge increase in it but at the same time that huge actual increase is masking the fact that there's massive fraud making it look even worse.

So I like Data Republican's closing sentence. I'm questioning literally everything now. That's where I'm at. It doesn't matter where the data comes from. My first reaction is really, how many of you are in the same place that you just don't believe any stat? I tend to be biased to believe statistics that agree with my preconceived notions, but I'm definitely feeling an alarm bell at the same time. And I didn't always feel that.

So here's another one where I didn't used to think this was true. So Elon Musk is talking on X or said this somewhere that the left has been using government programs for a long time to import voters so that they can create a block of voters that would vote together to control the American process. And that that's what the Somali immigration was all about. That Democrats were intentionally creating pockets where they could control who won because they would have a block of people who would vote the same.

Now we see that in Chicago for example more organically, that Chicago has a large Black population and they somewhat reliably are going to elect Black Democrats to be in charge, mayors. Not every time, but that would be the trend. So I used to doubt that that was intentional. I used to think, well yeah there is a lot of uncontrolled immigration and yeah it's natural that those people would want to settle with other people like themselves, but it's not some grand plan. I've changed my mind. I am now convinced that there had to be, just as Elon Musk is saying, there had to be a plan to do this intentionally to take control of the census, take control of local governments and effectively change the voting s

Context —

ituation in the United States and more alarmingly that they were very close to pulling it off and maybe they could still. And it would have made a permanent change in the ability for Republicans to get elected and it would have permanently made it impossible for anything but a Democrat to ever be in charge of anything important. And we were this close. Now it might still happen. I don't know. And…

Next segment → →