Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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rs were pretty confident about that in the past? I don't know what that number would be. I would like to invite anybody on to this Periscope as a guest. You can just click the option that says you want to be picked as a guest to join me specifically on the question of the 97% of climate scientists being on the same side. So if you believe that 97% or even 100% of scientists are on the same side o…

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t we also know how to iterate. So if the press is telling us we're doomed but the solution they're pushing, something like a Green New Deal, would make things worse, then the press is putting the entire planet at risk by not focusing on the only solution which is nuclear.

All right, so I would say that the press is putting, let's say, another billion people at risk. If the press is accurate about the risk of climate change then they are complicit in killing in the future maybe a billion people and destroying the economies of the world. So that's on them.

But the white supremacists, maybe 20 or 30 people they're killing.

What about health care? Do you believe that health care is unsolvable because Congress can't work it out? That's what it looks like, right? It looks like Congress can't figure out how to improve health care and that's true. But why is it that Congress can't sell health care? Well I would propose it's because they don't have the public behind any particular solution. So Congress can't really act without the public being in favor of what they're going to act on, at least in some majority way.

What is the public's opinion on health care? Well the public has been split into two camps by the press and those two camps can't get together. One says some kind of universal health care or one says anything but that. You can't put those together. If the press were reporting on all the things that let's say capitalism can do to lower health care costs, if the press were reporting that the current administration is actually doing quite a bit to reduce or to increase competition for drugs for example, if that had been a big story, that's what you'd be thinking we should do more of. If the press were focusing on the startups that are looking to lower let's say the cost of lab tests, the startups that will lower the cost of MRIs, if the press was treating the health care issue in a productive way instead of a split-the-sides way, probably we would have better health care.

So let's say the press kills 100,000 people a year by treating health care wrong. So that would be another body count for the press.

Let's look at the border wall and border security. Here we have a case where Republicans want better border security. Democrats want better border security. The same. Republicans want to listen to the experts when they decide how to spend their money on border security. Democrats want to look at experts to see how to spend their money on border security. Same. But what did the press do? The press turned those two sides that are basically the same, and for all of history until recently they worked it out. There has been border security funding in the past. There was no big problem because both sides wanted it. Both sides wanted to look at the experts to figure out how exactly to do it. But the press made it impossible this time for the Democrats to say yes to anything the Republicans wanted because the press had split the country. So the press wouldn't even let border security improve which of course would save lots of lives because the less crime that comes across, the less people are victims of crimes.

Now I know what you're gonna say. But what about the percentage of crimes? Because the people coming across have a lower percentage of crimes in general than the citizens. I don't care about the percentage. If I'm dead because somebody killed me who was an illegal immigrant, the last thing I'm going to say with my dying breath is well at least the percentage of crime is low compared to the average. That's the least likely thing I'm going to say.

So let's say that the press is responsible for crime coming across the border because they're the ones who are stopping the solutions. So I could probably go on but I would say that the press is an emergency situation if you look at the death toll. Whereas the white supremacists are a potential gigantic problem that is at the moment a small one. And you should probably be serious about the small problems that could become big problems. Maybe an emergency declaration would be just the thing.

All right, if you're following my ongoing saga in which I've been talking about the fake or let's say the false memory that the president once said that the racists in Charlottesville were fine people. So that's a false memory that is shared by at least half the country.

Now people have been asking me recently why are you calling that a false memory when it's just obvious that the Democrats and CNN and MSNBC, it's just obvious that they're just flat-out lying about it. It could not be more obvious because here's the document. Here's what the president said. And then here on the same day in the same statement he specifically excluded the racists from being good people and he specifically condemned them totally. So there's no question about the facts. The facts are unambiguous, not in question. When you actually look at them nobody questions them. So you can look at the video, you can look at the transcripts and still people say but it's not there.

So you say to yourself, okay the only explanation for how somebody can look at the transcript, this as I'm excluding the racists, I condemn them totally, the only way you could interpret "condemn totally" as "they're fine people" is if you are going to just lie about it.

Here's a little bit of understanding about reality that maybe you need to catch up on. It's very unlikely that people are looking at it and simply deciding to lie when there's such a clear public record of the opposite. It's not the sort of lie that most people would even think to take on because it's so easily disproved.

Here's the far more likely, and I'll put it in terms of likelihood, you can never know what's in the mind of every person. The greatest likelihood, and this is freaky, is that people can look at the statement and even as they're reading the statement, the sentence that debunks everything they believed is true, even as they're reading it it's disappearing. So in their minds they're erasing the new information at the same rate that it's coming in. Or they bring it in and you can observe that they'll act like they had never seen it within 60 seconds.

So I did a demonstration here on Periscope in which I showed you somebody who I don't think there's the slightest chance that the person that I had on Periscope was lying because you could tell by the way they expressed it they deeply believed in their own false memory of the event. And then when it was proven beyond any doubt, because you can just read the transcript and it's as clear as it could be, they have a mental like a reboot. Their brain just shuts off for a minute and that's typical. If you're a hypnotist it's something you've seen a lot. They'll say that one sentence is a lie. Yeah, which is sort of ridiculous.

So I would say based on my experience as a hypnotist and based on also, here's the important part, I do have some insight or information about CNN so you should assume I have some sources. And my sources tell me that they actually believe it's true. In other words CNN is operating from the same false memory as the people they're talking to. That it's not a lie. It's actually they think it happened so they just say it.

Now my best guess for how this false memory was formed is that the president said two different but related things and people are conflating them in their mind. One thing he said was that there were some bad actors on quote both sides. What he was talking about, both sides in that context of the bad actors, he was specifically talking about the racists and specifically talking about Antifa. Now he got in trouble for acting as though they were somehow morally equivalent which is just sort of the idiot's way of arguing. Yeah, if you want to look like an idiot accuse someone else of making a moral equivalence that they're obviously not making.

All right, now the president was obviously not comparing Nazis to protesters. He was saying quite honestly and quite truthfully there were bad actors in both places and you can't let people get away with being a bad actor. Doesn't matter that one's up here and one's down here. He's the law and order president. The law and order president doesn't say well you were a murderer but you only beat somebody badly. So those are not equal. Murderer is not the same as assault. Those are not in the same category. So I guess the assault's okay? Nobody says that. You say they're both bad.

So anyway the president said that both sides were bad actors or had bad actors among them. That part's true. Separately and on the same topic he said that there were fine people on both sides. But then he went on to clarify that that context, when he was talking about fine people, he said specifically I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists. I condemn them totally.

So he changed his context. He started to talk about bad deeds done by Antifa and bad deeds

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done by the Nazis. Then those were the two sides for that context. But in the same conversation about the same event he changed the meaning of both sides. He told you he was changing it. He said it specifically. He said now I'm not talking about the Nazis in this context but there were fine people there. The context meaning protesting the statues. So I think that's where the false memory comes fr…

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