Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2291 Scott Adams - CWSA 11/13/23, Reframing The News So You Can Use It

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tly 150,000 in both cases? But it's two different cases. I don't understand what's going on. I cannot figure out how to combine those two realities even by explaining that one has the wrong information and one has the right information. Like they are just so different worlds right now and I don't know what to make of it. So I'll tell you my general advice for every specific claim. The odds of it…

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d because of his belief that there was fraud. It's looking too perfect at the moment.

Aaron says to me, yeah you're too smart for a QAnon but you'd readily vote for the QAnon Shaman in Arizona. Yes I would. Was there a point you had to make? I see the anger and the sarcasm but I don't see the point. You're just saying what I said, that I would vote for him. And I don't believe QAnon. Is there a problem with that? Is there some conflict with that? I didn't say that he'd be a great congressperson. Did you hear something I didn't say? I didn't say that he would do policies that I love. I never said that. Yeah, drunk in the morning I think.

All right, there also in the Rasmussen universe there are some Wisconsin election machines and there's a document that shows a claim that somebody was going to make sure that they kept the important ones connected to the internet with a secret connection. Now that one actually looks too on the nose for me that it's in writing. You know, it looks like a real document. And there somebody was going to keep secret internet connections to some machines. Like that's just too on the nose. If I had to guess, and it would only be a guess, it might be true that there was a techie who said we'll keep these important ones connected to the internet. But that doesn't mean that they connected them to the internet to cheat. It could be they connected them to the internet for some kind of test that was temporary. I don't know. I don't know. So I don't even know how to score this one for its likelihood. There's just so much going on in this election domain. But again remember at least 90% of everything you hear about these elections will be debunked. You can guarantee that. Even if there's anything true, most will be BS.

All right, Greta Thunberg. So you all know her, famous climate science advocate, was at an event and another climate protester who you would think would be on her side came on stage and took the mic away from her because she kept talking about Gaza. And he was like, we're here to talk about climate. This is not for you to talk about Gaza. So that was fun. So watching the climate people hate on each other.

Cornel West making news. So despite the fact that Cornel West says directly that he loves all of his Jewish brothers and sisters, he still calls the situation over there an occupation. And here's what I call word thinking. So word thinking thinks you can win the argument if you get people to agree with your word. So that's what this is. So Cornel West is not engaged in anything like reason or debate. He's trying to win by getting you to think that his use of a word is the way you should use it too. So he says that Israel is an occupation. What does that mean? Is Gaza occupied? Well at the moment it is. But was Gaza occupied when Israel pulled out? Does he mean that? And what does occupied mean if you have a society in which some people like how it's going and some don't? It's like everybody's occupied, right? So that word occupation is doing way too much lifting. And he's getting all the pushback you would imagine. So yeah, a lot of pushback on that. Now he also uses apartheid. So those would be the two most disputed words in this situation. But the biggest problem he makes is trying to conflate all this stuff.

I'm going to say it again. I judge the October 7th event like it was the beginning of history. It wasn't. And things that happened before matter, but not to this. Not to this. The actual attack on October 7th requires a strong response that has nothing to do with anything that ever came before. So I refuse to act like that the history had anything to do with anything. And I ask you this question. Given that the Palestinians have a tremendous amount of support, more support than you thought, right? You probably, a lot of you were surprised. Wow, a lot of Palestinian support that you didn't know about. Now given that they have so much support, which means that their public relations has been successful to some extent, don't you think they could use that level of support to really highlight the specific complaints that Cornel West would call occupation or apartheid? Like what would be an example? And if they could give an example, could they give a specific solution?

So one of the cases might be, you know, our water rights were taken over by Israeli farmers. Something like that. You know, some ordinary thing like that. But what was the alternative? You know, you need to know a little bit about that. Was there a legitimate claim? Was the water not being used but it could be used productively over here? Was there any court case about it? I mean there's a lot to know before you can say if something's an occupation or simply the way things made sense at the time. So the dog not barking here — and I'll say it a million times — is if there's really a Palestinian set of complaints that would go under the title an occupation and an apartheid, give us examples. Give us real examples. And then maybe it would look to us like, oh wow, they actually have some real political complaints here. Maybe we should take this seriously. But if on the back of Hamas's incredible terrorist attack you're trying to push this vague notion that there's badness going on with no examples, it doesn't sound like anything use

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ful. And it makes the entire Palestinian narrative look like it's not real. Would you agree that the fact that these allegedly legitimate complaints are completely ignored while there seems to be a little bit too much understanding of why something like the Hamas situation could occur, maybe that's giving that a little bit too much credibility? And then I'll remind my audience that I'm not trying…

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