Relitigating Charlottesville with Dilbert creator Scott Adams

It didn't go great.

Just wrapped up a nearly two-hour conversation with Dilbert creator Scott Adams. If you’re wondering why the hell I would be having a conversation with Dilbert creator Scott Adams, please read this post from a few days ago.

When Scott reached out to me to appear on his show, I agreed, hoping that we would discuss his claim that political news is fake. I emphasized with him before our conversation that that was the topic I wanted to discuss. He agreed. Friends, that is not what we discussed.

The conversation began with a recitation of Scott’s qualifications to spot fake news. These qualifications included years in business, his MBA in Economics, his well-attuned bullshit detector, and his study of hypnosis. This list of his qualifications went on for quite a while. Interestingly, he never asked about my qualifications, perhaps assuming (correctly) I have none.

Presumably, the driver of the car that killed Heather Heyer was NOT one of Trump’s “very fine people.”

From there, we talked about various topics, including Covid, climate change, the Big Bang, Joe Biden, and, of course, Trump. We also discussed the Charlottesville incident, which I will get to you in a moment. We spent almost no time discussing the media, despite my repeated entreaties to return to that topic - as that was the topic I had agreed to come on to discuss.

Part of our DM conversation, in which he offers to teach me “spot fake news.” I respond I’m more interested in his assertion that news is fake. He said he thought they were part and parcel of the same conversation. They’re not.

It was a fascinating conversation for, I think, both of us. Scott has an apt phrase for this context: “Two movies playing on the same screen,” which I think pretty accurately describes much of the political conversation in this country. We’re operating under two different sets of facts, and it’s very difficult to get a handle on what the other person is talking about because, often, their information is wildly different from your information.

Let’s take the Charlottesville incident, or as those on the right claim, “The Charlottesville Hoax.” In their telling, a terrible event occurred in Charlottesville, VA on August 11^th, 2017, when violence erupted between white supremacists and the counter-protestors who showed up to refute their hatred. At that event, a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a white supremacist struck her with a car.

Afterwards, (again this is their telling) President Trump made a speech in which he condemned white supremacists and nazis “totally and completely.” Then, according to them, a couple years later Joe Biden announced his campaign for the presidency with the (their belief) lie that Trump had called Nazis “very fine people,” the media ran with that hoax, and it has continued to live in the public consciousness since.

That’s their version. It is also, as you may be unsurprised to learn, not entirely what happened, although there are elements of truth to it.

Let me stipulate that Trump did give remarks in which he said, within two days of each other:

I am happy to grant that Trump said those words because he DID say those things. However, I think it’s also incredibly important to give the larger context, as I tried to do with Scott to little success.

There is a larger argument that Trump only condemned these supporters (white supremacists and nazis) when there became a compelling political reason to do so. Did Trump EVER say the words “Nazis are very fine people”? He did not. Did the media report that he said those words? To my knowledge, they did not, although I’m sure there are isolated examples where one or more members of the media did say that – in fact, during our conversation, Scott pulled up a video of Jonathan Capehart (I think; it was hard to tell because I was watching Scott’s phone through a computer) saying that exact thing.

And yes, Trump absolutely DID condemn Nazis and white supremacists after his “very fine people on both sides” remark, referring (I assume) to the small number of non-KKK affiliated people attending the permitted event to peacefully and lovingly protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue.

The problem with this theory is that the permit for the event was issued to white supremacists, not to Confederate statue fans. So when Trump says, as he did:

You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest because, you know, I don’t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit, so I tell you this: there are two sides to every story.

Again, the people who had the permit were NAZIS.

Further, if we put his remarks into a larger context, it’s easy to understand why some people would believe that Trump is sympathetic to those very same white supremacists and Nazis. In fact, the white supremacists and Nazis agreed that Trump’s remarks indicated support for them. In this article, entitled “Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost,” authors Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman lead with this startling sentence:

President Trump buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no president has done in generations — equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.

They then go on to quote David Duke: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth” and the white supremacist most famous for getting punched in the face, Richard Spencer as saying, “Trump’s statement was fair and down to earth.”

If the Nazis are praising your statement, maybe you’re doing it wrong?

We can travel backwards in time to look at even more context, including Trump’s refusal to disavow David Duke’s support. I looked for the original Jake Tapper interview, but I could not find it. Here’s a report on that story from CBS.

We can look at how he began his campaign, by maligning immigrants: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Notice how the remarks are very similar as to his remarks in Charlottesville, although their intention is the opposite. In Charlottesville, he condemned the Nazis in one breath, but in the other said “there were very fine people on both sides.” In Trump’s campaign launch, he smears the vast majority of immigrants and then throws a bone to the small number he assumes are good people.

Consider his remarks about Muslims (“I think Muslims hate us”) the “shithole countries” comment, and everything else we know about the man. This is a person who may not align himself directly with the white supremacists and Nazis, but seems to have little problem courting their votes. Ditto the “western chauvinist” Proud Boys, “Stand back and stand by.”

This “Charlottesville Hoax” seems to be Scott’s bete noir. He brings it up all the time as the premiere example of the media “lying.” When I asked him to please show me videos of journalists reporting that Trump had said “Nazis are very fine people,” he was unable to do so for several minutes. Eventually, somebody sent him a compilation of clips, only one of which contained what I asked for, the aforementioned Johnathon Capeheart. This took several minutes of me standing back and standing by.

In the end, I think it was a respectful conversation. We both did our best to hear the other person. We both asked clarifying questions and we both did our best to answer. We both acknowledged errors when we made them. But it’s clear that we’re living in two different realities.

For example, at one point Adams casually mentioned that “The Big Bang Theory” has been debunked. At which point, I almost leapt out of my chair because he said it so casually while moving onto another point. I had to actually arrest the conversation to dig further into that claim.

Because of my interest in UFOs, I happen to have a fairly decent layman’s understanding of our current state of cosmology. Let me be unequivocal: the Big Bang Theory has NOT been debunked. There are alternative theories out there but the Big Bang is our best model of understanding the origins of the universe that currently exist. When I asked him about this, Adams pointed to the fact the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted galaxies which appear to be “too old” to exist if our current understanding of galaxy formation is correct, as support for his argument that the Big Bang Theory has been debunked. The problem is that galaxy formation has almost nothing to do with the Big Bang Theory and does nothing to disprove the Big Bang.

Just wanted to post a pretty JWTS image.

The reason I mention this is because when we start talking about a topic in which I have even a layman’s understanding, I can immediately point out that he’s mistaken. I don’t think he’s lying, but he’s wrong. If he’s so effortlessly wrong about that, why should I take him at his word on climate science, a subject in which is also not an expert but acts as if he is? Or covid, a subject in which he is also not an expert but acts as if he is?

Answer, I should not.

Which is why I turn to experts when I want that sort of information. The problem with turning to experts, in the Scott Adams worldview, is that they will always adjust their findings to serve the agenda of the person who writes their check. And while I agreed with Scott that there are political calculations in science, as in every other endeavor, the idea that all scientists are fudging their data to comport with whatever “they” want to find is utter horseshit.

I thank Scott for having me on. I hope I was respectful towards him and his beliefs, some of which may turn out to be correct. I’m only sorry that we never got a chance to discuss the actual topic of discussion: his assertion that all political news is fake. I will say that his evidence for most, if not all, of the assertions he made (“I don’t know that the planet is getting hotter.” “The Big Bang has been debunked”) was weak.

That being said, I didn’t view this as a “debate” and I’m not interested in “who won.” My intention was only to understand his worldview and to challenge him if his words didn’t align with my understanding of reality.

Here's the full video if you want to spend a frustrating hour and forty minutes of your time.