Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes › Episode #381 › Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 381 Scott Adams - Buzzfeed, Wall Negotiations, Needle Parks, More

Context —

so many fun things in the news. Let's start with BuzzFeed. Now, I like to remind you what my prediction record is. Now this isn't quite a prediction, but I want to remind you that when the BuzzFeed story first broke that Michael Cohen had said blah blah blah, it doesn't matter what he said because it wasn't true, or at least it's fallen apart. And when I talked about it on Periscope, was it yester…

← Previous segment →

ing to give up something that private would have given up more. And by now BuzzFeed would be reporting on basically the result of the whole thing. And of course they're not. And so that was another red flag. And then of course the whole fact that it was an anonymous source. So you've got anonymous source, fits their narrative perfectly, nobody else can confirm it, it's BuzzFeed who is unreliable, the authors are unreliable. If you didn't see this one coming, you can't see anything coming, because this one was broadcasting from a long way off. Hey, fake news coming. We got some fake news coming. But a lot of people wanted to believe it.

All right, that's enough on that. You probably noted that a lot of people got the talking points about the Pelosi flight to Afghanistan being canceled at the last minute by President Trump. And the standard reaction was it's childish. It's childish, like a fifth grader. It's such a childish thing to do. I don't think that worked as well as they hoped it would because it was also reported simultaneously that it was a tit for tat. But it was a tit for tat for something childish, which was postponing the State of the Union. So who could possibly listen to the Democrats saying that the tit-for-tat response was childish but not the original? You know who started it.

Now, like most of us, I think we're watching this as entertainment, right? We're watching it as an entertainment show. It was sort of the perfect reality TV response to the reality TV provocation, which is the cancellation of the whole deal.

Now, do you remember that I told you, I don't know how long ago, I said that the kill shot for Nancy Pelosi's statement that the wall is immoral, what did I tell you the kill shot would be? That would be the persuasion kill shot. Does anybody remember it? Because I like to ask you, in case anybody is coming into this late, they can get some confirmation that I'm predicting things ahead of time.

Now the engineering question we'll talk about that separately. So that's a different kill shot. I'm talking about specifically the question of whether a wall is moral or immoral. What did I tell you was the best response to that? Well, let me remind you since it doesn't look like anybody's going to get the right answer. I told you that the kill shot was to start asking other Democrats to defend the statement that some walls are moral and

Context —

some are not. And what did you see? You saw the media start to ask the other Democrats, do you agree that this wall is immoral? Because it's a completely unsupportable concept. Now Pelosi could probably get away with it because Pelosi is an advocate, right? So when you see the head of the party or one of the leaders of the party, when you see them say something crazy, you say to yourself, well, t…

Next segment → →