Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 1202 Scott Adams - Dale and I Tell You the News From Both Realities

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n't exist. But it would be great advice otherwise wouldn't it? I mean if it did, if it existed, pretty good advice. So here's some more advice that's exactly like that transporter example. Follow the science. Do we have — how much proof do you need? The people can't do that. You can't do that because you don't know which science is real. How about follow the facts? You can't do that because you d…

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ry that just blows up and in the initial days everything you know about the story ends up being wrong, right? We call that the fog of war. When it's new and there's too many things happening all the information is wrong. You don't know anything until a few days have gone by.

I would say that the election and allegations of election fraud were very much that fog of war situation. Very much a fog of war. Meaning that whatever allegations of fraud came out of the first week or so after the election, if you were to look at them on average what you should expect is that they would be weak or false compared to any allegations which were developed over more time.

So if you were to look at the bag of allegations after let's say the fourth week of research versus the bag of allegations on the first week, there should be a big difference. And the Democrats have lulled themselves into a sense that the highly inaccurate fog of war accusations that came out of the first week tell you the quality to expect after the fourth week when we've had time to look into it. And I don't think those are going to be even close.

All right, now if there's nothing there then it will be BS in the beginning and BS at the end. But if there is something there, the normal way you should expect things to go is that the initial things you heard were more BS than real but by the end it would be more real than BS. But it will take you a while to get there.

So everybody who's looking at the court cases that got filed a few weeks ago and it's just taking a while to work through the system and go to the higher courts etc., they largely are meaningless. They're really nothing but stalling tactics. I think that was actually the legal strategy, was just to stall, keep the topic open until they can find better evidence. I've said this before but boy do we need a dictator retirement system.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you want a dictator to leave power, what are they going to do? If you're a dictator and you give up power do you end up like Gaddafi? Do you end up like Mussolini? Giving up power looks like kind of a bad deal. And if the only way you can end a bad situation is to get a dictator out of that job, why would they ever leave? You need some kind of an exit path where a dictator who's in a pretty good situation, because a dictator gets to retire with some kind of confidence that they won't be killed and they can still have a good life and their family won't be rounded up etc.

And although I do not consider President Trump a dictator, look at the situation that has been created not by him. Here's the situation. There's this sketchy election. Was that his fault? Is it President Trump's fault that the election has low credibility? Not really. You know there was a pandemic. We did the best we could but there were too many opportunities for cheating. So we have this election that is at least doubted by the majority of the country at this point. So he didn't cause that. In fact he argued very strongly against mail-in ballots which may have helped. I don't know. Maybe he'd still be complaining about the voting machines but they've created a situation where they're saying that once he's out of power they're going to go after him and try to put him in jail.

And the only thing that's keeping him out of jail, say half the country, is that he's still in office. And the moment he leaves office he's going to go to jail. Now do you have to be an expert on human motivation to know what that will cause? I can't put myself in the president's mind but if you put me in that situation am I going to concede the election? Would you concede an election if the people who are asking you to concede are saying, "Would you please concede this election and we can just put you in jail?" Why would you do that?

So the Democrats have created a situation where he has to hold on. He has to fight. And if there's a gray area he has to push it. If there's a boundary he has to test it. If there's a door he has to see if it's unlocked. If there's one breath left in his body he absolutely has to pursue it because they made that situation. He didn't create that situation. This situation was created by Democrats.

And no matter what he wanted about being president or not being president, no matter how bad he felt about losing etc., if he lost he doesn't have a choice. Now you kind of forced his hand. If you want him to concede you're gonna have to give him an exit ramp. He doesn't have one.

Let me suggest one just for fun and conversation. This is never going to happen but it's possible. It's just deeply unlikely. There are two pardons which I think would help the country move forward and I think you would agree. You won't like one of these pardons and people on the other side of the political divide they're not going to like the other one. So it's going to be like a hostage exchange, you know, one pardon for one pardon just to move the country ahead.

And they would go like this: a blanket pardon for Hunter Biden. Blanket pardon meaning not specific to a crime. And I believe Richard Nixon got one of those. It's just time limited. So in other words you say we pardon everything you've done up to today's date. Likewise you do the same thing with President Trump.

Now you might need to put Pence in

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office for one day to do the pardon to make it legal or whatever but you could do it. And you trade a Hunter Biden pardon, a generic one for everything up to that date, for a President Trump pardon for everything that's happened up to the date of his last day in office. Would you object? Because the Hunter Biden stuff I think is real and it's also a risk to the United States because it puts him i…

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