Guest Post by Scott Adams
If you’re following the news, you know FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI found a bunch of emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
Wait…hold on…the Gods of Humor demand that I pause here to insert a few Weiner jokes before I get to my point about Comey.
Okay, I got that out of my system.
Back to Comey.
Continue reading “James Comey – As seen through the Persuasion Filter”
Guest Post by Scott Adams
An anxious world watches, and waits, while the American public does its best to select a new leader. Perhaps it would help the process if we agree on what a good leader is.
Much has been said about Donald Trump’s bully ways. I think that’s a fair characterization of his approach. And in that sense, Trump is similar to LBJ or Steve Jobs. Each of those leaders prioritized the mission above anyone’s feelings. If you are useful to the mission, the bully leader praises and rewards you. If you are in the way, the bully leader pushes you aside without remorse. When selecting this type of leader, what matters most is the leader’s priorities. You can feel confident that the bully leader will get you there, but expect some casualties along the way. The bully leader often leaves a trail of destruction. Case in point, Jeb Bush will always be the “low energy” guy.
The bully leader is neither good nor bad. What matters is the leader’s priorities. Trump’s priorities are jobs, national defense, and making America greater. That’s not the bad kind of bully. And if you want to “drain the swamp,” a bully can be exactly the right choice.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
A few days ago I tweeted a message that induced cognitive dissonance in a lot of Twitter users and some of the bottom-feeding media (Salon, HuffPo). This is a good case study for understanding the phenomenon. Here’s the tweet:
Cognitive dissonance happens when you are confronted with a truth that conflicts with your self-image. To reconcile the conflict, your brain automatically triggers an hallucination to rationalize-away the discrepancy.
To be clear, that is the way normal brains work. Cognitive dissonance is happening to all of us on a regular basis. It’s just easier to spot when it happens to someone else.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
I’ve been trying to figure out what common trait binds Clinton supporters together. As far as I can tell, the most unifying characteristic is a willingness to bully in all its forms.
If you have a Trump sign in your lawn, they will steal it.
If you have a Trump bumper sticker, they will deface your car.
if you speak of Trump at work you could get fired.
On social media, almost every message I get from a Clinton supporter is a bullying type of message. They insult. They try to shame. They label. And obviously they threaten my livelihood.
We know from Project Veritas that Clinton supporters tried to incite violence at Trump rallies. The media downplays it.
We also know Clinton’s side hired paid trolls to bully online. You don’t hear much about that.
Yesterday, by no coincidence, Huffington Post, Salon, and Daily Kos all published similar-sounding hit pieces on me, presumably to lower my influence. (That reason, plus jealousy, are the only reasons writers write about other writers.)
Guest Post by Scott Adams
I watched the third and most boring presidential debate last night. Here are my thoughts.
Clinton’s goal was to stay vertical for ninety minutes and sound more well-informed than Trump while framing him as an unstable monster. She accomplished all of that and won the debate, in my opinion.
But it wasn’t a big win.
Trump only needed to act semi-presidential, and he did. We don’t expect him to have the same mastery of the facts. The bar is lower for the outsider. He needed a knockout punch but there was none.
Persuasion-wise, the most emotionally powerful moments involved Clinton describing Trump as a sexist/racist monster who can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. “Scary” was the only message she needed to drive home, and she did.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Here’s a little thought experiment for you:
If a friend said he could see a pink elephant in the room, standing right in front of you, but you don’t see it, which one of you is hallucinating?
Answer: The one who sees the pink elephant is hallucinating.
Let’s try another one.
If a friend tells you that you were both abducted by aliens last night but for some reason only he remembers it, which one of you hallucinated?
Answer: The one who saw the aliens is hallucinating.
Now let’s add some participants and try another one.
If a crowd of people are pointing to a stain on the wall, and telling you it is talking to them, with a message from God, and you don’t see anything but a stain, who is hallucinating? Is it the majority who see the stain talking or the one person who does not?
Continue reading “I Wake You Up for the Presidential Debate”
Not only is the dying legacy media rigging the election for Hillary, the ultra-libs who run Facebook, Google, and Twitter are using all kinds of nefarious means to slant social media towards a Hillary victory. Scott has over 81,000 followers. Fuck Jack Dorsey and his Twitter for Hillary bullshit. I’m going to lead the fight with my 458 followers.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
According to many of my Twitter followers, Twitter is “shadowbanning” me. If true, that means someone at Twitter has decided to suppress my free speech on the site, presumably because I have said good things about Trump’s talents for persuasion. My tweets do not align with Twitter’s political preferences as I understand them.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
By now you know about the Access Hollywood recording in which Donald Trump said bad things eleven years ago. Many of my readers asked me to weigh in. One of the requests came from anti-Trump GOP elite person Erick Erickson. (Middle name Erick, I assume.) This was his polite request and my response. Read it from bottom to top.
Challenge accepted!
I’ll give you my thoughts, in no particular order.
1. If this were anyone else, the election would be over. But keep in mind that Trump doesn’t need to outrun the bear. He only needs to outrun his camping buddy. There is still plenty of time for him to dismantle Clinton. If you think things are interesting now, just wait. There is lots more entertainment coming.
2. This was not a Trump leak. No one would invite this sort of problem into a marriage.
3. I assume that publication of this recording was okayed by the Clinton campaign. And if not, the public will assume so anyway. That opens the door for Trump to attack in a proportionate way. No more mister-nice-guy. Gloves are off. Nothing is out of bounds. It is fair to assume that Bill and Hillary are about to experience the worst weeks of their lives.
Continue reading “Why Does This Happen on My Vacation? (The Trump Tapes)”
Guest Post by Scott Adams
As most of you know, I had been endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety, because I live in California. It isn’t safe to be a Trump supporter where I live. And it’s bad for business too. But recently I switched my endorsement to Trump, and I owe you an explanation. So here it goes.
1. Things I Don’t Know: There are many things I don’t know. For example, I don’t know the best way to defeat ISIS. Neither do you. I don’t know the best way to negotiate trade policies. Neither do you. I don’t know the best tax policy to lift all boats. Neither do you. My opinion on abortion is that men should follow the lead of women on that topic because doing so produces the most credible laws. So on most political topics, I don’t know enough to make a decision. Neither do you, but you probably think you do.
Given the uncertainty about each candidate – at least in my own mind – I have been saying I am not smart enough to know who would be the best president. That neutrality changed when Clinton proposed raising estate taxes. I understand that issue and I view it as robbery by government.
I’ll say more about that, plus some other issues I do understand, below.
Continue reading “Why I Switched My Endorsement from Clinton to Trump”
Since we post several of his articles … I thought this might be of interest.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
It’s hard to count people who are intentionally hiding. But just for fun, let’s see if we can deduce how many so-called Shy Trump Supporters are out there.
For starters, we can say with certainty that they exist. I have a better ear for that than most of you because of my Trump blogging and my public endorsement of Clinton for my personal safety. People feel comfortable telling me privately, and also anonymously online, that they hide their Trump support from their spouse and coworkers. So we know they exist. We just don’t know how many.
We know that sometimes robocall surveys and online surveys show more Trump support than human-to-human polling. So that might be an indicator, but we don’t know what other variables are in play.
In a recent Reuters poll, 7% of respondents “refused” to vote for either Trump or Clinton. I’m guessing some Shy Trump Supporters “park” their votes with Gary Johnson (polling at 9.3%) or Jill Stein (polling at 3.3%).
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Let’s talk about Trump’s foreign policy speech from a persuasion standpoint.
Trump read from the teleprompter and acted more “presidential,” whatever that means. And he softened his position on Muslim immigration to “extreme vetting.” That was a good strategy for rebranding himself as less scary, but I doubt many people will watch that speech, so it won’t have much impact.
Anyway, let’s talk about what else Trump got right – or wrong – persuasion-wise.
I thought it was a big mistake for Trump to use the word “vicious” when talking about the search for potential terrorists in the homeland. That only makes Trump look scarier. And scariness is his biggest problem right now.
It was also a big mistake to talk about taking the oil from Iraq to pay for the wounded soldiers and their families. Trump could have sold his “take the oil” idea by clarifying that the funds would pay for our military presence to keep Iraq secure, for the benefit of Iraqis. And part of that budget could go to wounded vets and military families. That would sound better.
I watched Clinton surrogates on CNN criticize Trump’s speech, and their criticisms were mostly these two:
1. All of Trump’s foreign policy ideas are crazy and uninformed.
2. Obama is already wisely doing all of those same things.
That would seem absurd in any other context. But keep in mind that we voters believe we can assess foreign policy ideas by listening to biased liars talk on television. So the entire situation is ridiculous, but we play along.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
As amazing as this sounds, I watched a video clip of Dr. Drew explaining to CNN’s Don Lemon that Trump does NOT show signs of insanity or dangerous narcissism. Indeed, as Dr. Drew explained, some healthy narcissism is probably helpful for leaders because they want to be seen as successful. (I have said the same in this blog post, and also this one, which are totally worth another look.)
Is the amazing part of this story that Dr. Drew thinks Trump is probably sane?
No.
The amazing part is that Team Clinton’s persuasion is now so powerful that the question of Trump’s sanity seemed like a legitimate question for the press.
Okay, okay, I know you don’t think the press is legitimate, and CNN is clearly favoring Clinton. But even under those conditions you still need events in the real world to support your pro-Clinton narrative. And apparently CNN thought it had that justification. They had cover from all the pro-Clinton pundits who are saying Trump is mentally unbalanced (with different language).
Guest Post by Scott Adams
When you are trained in the ways of persuasion, you start seeing three types of people in the world. I’ll call them Rational People, Word-Thinkers, and Persuaders. Their qualities look like this:
Rational People: Use data and reason to arrive at truth. (This group is mostly imaginary.)
Word-Thinkers: Use labels, word definitions, and analogies to create the illusion of rational thinking. This group is 99% of the world.
Persuaders: Use simplicity, repetition, emotion, habit, aspirations, visual communication, and other tools of persuasion to program other people and themselves. This group is about 1% of the population and effectively control the word-thinkers of the world.
If you’re a trained scientist, engineer, or other technical person, you might use data and reason sometimes, especially while others are watching and checking your work. But off-duty – and when it comes to anything important – we’re all irrational creatures who believe we are rational. At least that’s how trained persuaders see the world.
You can easily spot word-thinkers when they talk about politics. Their go-to strategy involves identifying enemies and fitting them into whatever category matches their biases and cognitive dissonance. Look for this form:
Guest Post by Scott Adams
What exactly is the risk of a Trump presidency? Beats me. But let’s talk about it anyway.
Your Abysmal Track Record
For starters, ask yourself how well you predicted the performance of past presidents. Have your psychic powers been accurate?
I’m not good at predicting the performance of presidents. I thought Reagan would be dangerous, but he presided over the end of the Cold War. And I thought George W. Bush would be unlikely to start a war, much less two of them.
But it gets better. Even AFTER the presidency, can you tell who did the best job? I can’t. You think you can, but you can’t. And the simple reason for that is because there is no base case with which to compare a president. All we know is what did happen, not what might have happened if we took another path. You can’t compare a situation in the real world to your imaginary world in which something better happened. That is nonsense. And yet we do it. Watch me prove it right now.
So, how did President Obama do on the job? Was he a good president?
If you have an answer in your head – either yes or no – it proves you don’t know how to make decisions. No judgement can be made about Obama’s performance because there is nothing to which it can be compared. No one else in a parallel universe was president at the same time, doing different things and getting different results.
I’m not a fan of everything our president has done, but I feel as if historians will rank him as one of our best presidents. Definitely in the top 20%.
Wait, what? Am I crazy?
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Hillary Clinton rolled out a new campaign slogan this weekend: “We’re stronger together.” And by new slogan, I mean it is the same as a recent Estee Lauder ad campaign slogan. But Trump borrowed from Reagan with his “Make America Great Again” slogan, so let’s score it a tie in terms of originality.
Now let’s see how the slogans compare in terms of persuasion. I’ll start with Trump’s slogan first, then look at Clinton’s new offering.
Trump’s slogan uses the following persuasion techniques:
1. Provides no targets for disagreement.
2. Everyone has their own sense of what “great” means and how to do it. That vagueness is hardcore hypnosis technique.
3. It speaks to identity (the strongest form of persuasion) as Americans.
4. It suggests we lost something. Humans have more emotional connection to loss than potential gain.
5. It has “America” in it. That word is persuasion catnip for Americans. We have been brainwashed to have a twitch response to it.
6. It appeals to both genders.
7. It is aspirational. We all want to be better, or to make the country better.
Now let’s look at Clinton’s new slogan.