Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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t is true that the witnesses didn't witness very much. Even the people who say the election was fair, I think they would agree with that statement. For example, has anybody witnessed the software working? Has anybody audited the lines of code? Is there anybody who has a chain of custody all the way from the vote to the vote counting and beyond? No. No, we don't have that. So if you were to look a…

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istent on that. Yes, Rudy was specifically and intentionally using persuasion that you could of course call propaganda, of course. And it was clear, obvious, he wasn't hiding it. And do you know what Rudy is? He's something called an advocate. Do you know what the job of an advocate is? Advocating. It's advocating. Yeah. His job is to persuade you. If you want to call that propaganda, I'm okay with that. So I accept that. We're fine. That's his job.

Now, he also on top of that is managing public opinion. He is managing the opinions of maybe future judges and juries. This is his job. So when somebody whose job it is to do propaganda does propaganda, isn't hiding it even a little bit. It's right out there. I'm an advocate. I have a client. Client's paying me. That's pretty transparent. So I don't mind propaganda that's packaged as propaganda. And that's what that was.

But if you're the news and you're selling me propaganda packaged as news, I've got a labeling problem there. You tried to convince the world that that was good propaganda. That's right. There's good propaganda and bad propaganda. Again, somebody's trying to catch me in some kind of inconsistency. There's good propaganda. Trump does it all the time. When Trump says the economy is great, it's getting better, that's good propaganda because when he says that stuff, it causes people to invest and feel confident and then the economy is good.

When Trump says our military is like way, way better than it was before he took office, is it necessarily true? I don't know. You don't know. None of us know what's happening in the military because they keep that secret, right? But is it good propaganda to tell the world even more than he's telling the country? He's telling the world, "We've got the best military you've ever seen, and it was pretty good before, but now it's even way better." Is that good propaganda or bad propaganda? Because it keeps you safe, right? That's good propaganda.

So just know that when an advocate, a politician is saying something, that's always propaganda, but it could be the good kind. If your news is giving you propaganda instead of news, and they're selling it as news, that's fraud. It's different.

All right. A poor economy would increase the number of military volunteers. That's true. But I don't think that matters in our technical wars. I just don't see us having a war in which standing armies of China or Russia or the United States go at it with a tank war. We're not going to have a tank war with China or a tank war with Russia. That's not going to happen. Anybody who, I mean, the reason it's not going to happen is that whoever moved a force of tanks against a superpower would lose all of their tanks in 60 minutes. I'm not wrong about that. Right.

Somebody says, "Go talk to Ali and apologize." I'm not going to apologize for calling him smart because that's what I call him. So I don't know what you're talking about. When people call me smart, I usually say, "Thank you. I do not require an apology."

All right. Check Trump's most recent tweet. Is it that good? All right. I usually don't like to do that because it slows down the pace here, but let me do that anyway. Trump. Trump. Trump. Have you noticed that Trump doesn't come up first in your fill-in sometimes? He does. So he comes out, so Donald J. Trump, the real Donald Trump thing. It comes up fourth when I search in Twitter for Trump. Donald Trump has 80 whatever million followers and he comes up fourth when you start typing in Trump.

Ahead of him is the pus account. Perfectly fair. Then there's Trump Googling. It's not even a blue check. And then there is a blue check, but it's Tiffany Trump. That's right. Tiffany Trump comes up in the search before Donald Trump. And you're wondering if Section 230 should be important. Yeah.

All right. So now that I'm done ranting on that, okay, it's getting good now. So Trump just tweeted 11 minutes ago. Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove that his ridiculous 80 million votes were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he's got a big unsolvable problem.

Oh, I tell you, Trump doesn't know how to not be provocative. I

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don't think he knows how to be boring. He just can't be boring. He just doesn't know how. So he's now obviously you can't prove a negative. So he's said basically what he said is he's not leaving the White House which was how it will be interpreted because you can't really prove a negative. So he's created a situation where the news will have to talk about his allegation that there's all this frau…

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