Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
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QandA Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 33 - Hate versus Ideas and the Illusion Driving Hate

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ntry, not my neighborhood, but all over the country. Not once in two and a half years did I hear a Trump supporter say something that sounded dog-whistley, pro-racist. I've never even heard them sort of frame it that way. But the people on the left are pretty sure that in a private conversation Republicans are actually racists. That if nobody's looking and they're talking to each other it's like,…

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ard for somebody to take it out of context, right? So bear with me.

If somebody like me—let's say not me but a person who was persuasive and non-racist, you know, not me, I'm talking about another person—if that person attended a KKK meeting, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Well, if a non-racist who was very persuasive spent time with a bunch of KKK people, what is the most likely outcome? Is the outcome that the KKK would convert the non-racist to a racist, or that the hypothetical persuasive non-racist might have an impact on the racist? Maybe not that day, but plant some seeds that would sort of move them toward a better position.

So my view is if you hate the people I talk to, do an interview with, go on their TV show, go on their podcast, if you hate them you should enjoy that I'm associating with them—unless you hate my ideas. If you hate my ideas, then maybe you think that they're being promoted. But I'm a special case because I'm Switzerland when it comes to people's good and bad views. I will associate with people with good views. I will associate with people who have very despicable views. Generally speaking they will be familiar with my opinion of their views when I'm done with it.

All right, so you should not be concerned if I talked to somebody that you think is odious. You should say to yourself, "Oh, contact with that cartoonist guy may have made that person a little less odious. Spread the persuasion truth."

All right, so you're watching the character assassination that's taking place against me in the media. So have you noticed that if you saw—there were probably maybe 10 media articles that directly talked about me being involved with some part of the Kanye and Candace news story. And in those 10 or so major articles that I saw, how many of them gave attention to Kanye and Candace's ideas? Now think about it. Of all the articles you saw that talked about Kanye's tweet saying good things about Candace, did they say, "Well, let's describe Candace's ideas. So Candace says this and that, and that's different from what the left believes, and here's why she says it." How many of them did that?

And wasn't that really, from the beginning, the only point? No. What they did was they smeared her by just saying, "Uh, she's in the party with all the racists. She's making common cause with..." They went completely personal and made her point. So if Candace Owens had not already made her point as strongly as it could be made, her critics really did make it for her by attacking her personally instead of even dealing with the idea, never really even grappled with the point.

Now what about me? So I've been talking about freeing from the mental prison, similar to what both of them were talking about. When they talked about me in these articles, did they say, "And Adams' point that he's trying to express is this. We either agree with it or we don't. Or here's what the critics say," or whatever. That would be fair. Did you see that? You didn't see that.

What you saw is they started sorting through my ancient past to find, you know, and they came up with quite a few things that out of context sound terrible. By the way, I'll blog up my response to the personal attacks just so you can see them in context if you care. You will be, I think it would be very surprising. Let me tell you, you would be very surprised to see my responses if you haven't already heard them to the accusations. Because if you look at the accusations against me by themselves, you would say to yourself, "Okay, I don't see how there's any ambiguity about that."

Now let me give you an example. This is just a fake example. So if my critic says, "Scott is a serial killer and everybody knows it," somebody reads that and goes, "Well that's pretty unambiguous." What exactly would be your response to being a serial killer? And then you find out that the real reason is that it's breakfast cereal. That I eat a lot of it. You would be amazed at how different the real story is from what you see in the headlines. I mean just mind-bogglingly amazed at how different they are.

All right, so people saying liberalism is a mental disorder, please stop saying that because that doesn't help. That actually is their philosophy. So the liberal philosophy is that there's something wrong with the people on the other side. If you say there's something wrong with those liberals, their mind, you know they're idiots or whatever, you sort of bought into the remodel. You have a president whose brain a whole bunch of ideas which you could like and you could dislike some of them. You can like his effectiveness or think it isn't enough in other areas. But talking about people is not what Kanye would suggest. I certainly not what I would suggest.

All right, you have a point too. You have an opportunity to rise above it. The left is defining itself by its hatred of individuals for their ideas. They're not saying "I dislike your idea." They're saying "I dislike you." They're saying you're deplorable. They're not saying that people have these ideas that we don't like. They're saying you're deplorable. Rise above it. No, I don't know if rising above it is a good political technique. I suppose those could be separate, right? But as a human being, try to ri

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se above it. Yeah, let the politics or now anyway they will. Now let me amplify a point I made. I saw somebody on the right using the phrase that I believe Candace Owens has used a number of times, and I criticized it. And so let me clarify my criticism. If you're on the right and you're trying to make the point that African-American voters should leave the Democrat stronghold and maybe consider…

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