The Scott Adams School - 04/29/26 WALTER KIRN Joins the Home Team

Summary

Real Coffee with Scott Adams: "The Scott Adams School" – April 29, 2026 Special Guest: Walter Kirn

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Scott Adams' "Real Coffee" streams through the prism of "the persuasion filter," joined by novelist, essayist, and social observer Walter Kirn, fresh off the intense interest in his script "The Rash." The hosts and panelists (Erica, Marcela, and Owen) dissect current events, the pandemic's lingering psychological legacy, the construction of public narratives, and the performative aspect of modern political drama. The discussion pivots between Walter's planned satire, critiques of the COVID era, media manipulation, political violence, and the power of group psychology—delivered with sharp wit and open skepticism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction: Setting the Stage for “The Rash”

• [02:28] Walter Kirn introduces the concept behind “The Rash,” a screenplay using a fictional skin pandemic to examine mass hysteria, institutional power grabs, and public manipulation.
  • Kirn frames it as a satire in the tradition of “Dr. Strangelove” and “Network,” aimed at “immunizing our public against future engineered hysterias.”
  • Quote:
    • “The Rash is a movie script that I wrote as a way of immunizing our public against future engineered hysterias like the one that I believe occurred during COVID.” — Walter Kirn [02:28]

2. How COVID Changed Society

• [07:17–11:01] The group agrees the pandemic led to overreach, civil liberty abrogations, and a lasting sense of alienation and mistrust—especially for children and small businesses.

  • Walter emphasizes lasting trauma:
    • “America lost its mind. It abrogated its constitutional guarantees of civil liberties across the board. It destroyed the economy for small business... for no real medical reason.” — Walter Kirn [07:17]
  • Impact on Children: Emotional, developmental, and linguistic setbacks.

• [13:02–13:29] The hosts recall the social engineering aspects ("IV drip of Zoom and Apple News") and the tactics used to divide families and friends.

3. Media and Narrative Manufacturing

• [15:19–19:19]
  • Walter critiques journalists and media figures for manipulating public perception, drawing connections between coverage of the Luigi Mangioni event and historical assassinations.
  • Kirn’s key point: Contemporary events are staged as gripping miniseries, engineered for emotional effect and behavioral compliance.
  • Quote:
    • “By framing them correctly and by putting them in a certain order and by adding commentary ... we can turn it into a miniseries. And that's exactly what's happened.” — Walter Kirn [17:54]
  • He challenges the plausibility of "lone wolf" explanations for political violence, suggesting deeper, coordinated motives should be considered.

4. Political Violence, Groupthink, and the Power of Fear

• [24:11–29:29]
  • The standard “he just snapped” media template is critiqued as a way of avoiding difficult political questions. Walter alludes to possible conspiratorial frameworks based on recent events with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s misappropriated funds (used to stoke extremism they claim to fight).
    • Quote:
      • “Only in America do we believe that political violence is the work of psychotics... We should default to a suspicion that it is the political enemies of someone acting in concert...” — Walter Kirn [24:11]
  • [30:24–33:19]
    • Further speculation on why powerful figures gather in one place (i.e., low security at the White House correspondence dinner), with emphasis on the unknowability of “the real story” behind high-level events.

5. Information Trust and “The Hoaxocracy”

• [50:55–53:25]
  • Walter coins "hoaxocracy" to describe how fake or misleading information dominates public consciousness. The group re-examines the initial COVID panic (viral videos from China) as mass manipulation.
    • Quote:
      • “We live in a hoaxocracy. In fact, it's very hard to find any of these events that on real scrutiny, stand up. And Covid is the biggest of them all.” — Walter Kirn [50:55]
  • Advice: Don't trust information from “polluted channels”; shared mass media panic does more harm than ignorance.
  • Erica: “If it’s too bad to be true, it probably isn’t.” — Walter Kirn [53:25]

6. Social Conformity vs. Individual Courage

• [55:31–56:24]
  • Walter urges listeners not to succumb to herd mentality: “You are not an insect. You do not live in a hive... a little bit of courage from a lot of people can change everything.”
  • The panel discusses the importance of neighbor-to-neighbor conversation to resist social programming.

7. Closing Segments: Absurdity and Contradiction of Pandemic Policies

• [57:13–58:31]
  • The group notes how illogical pandemic policies served as authoritarian loyalty tests (“You can go to a strip club but not church”) and how the goal was to suppress dissenters and reward compliant followers.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Narrative Management:
  • "Contemporary events are staged as gripping miniseries... engineered for emotional effect..." — Walter Kirn [17:54]
• On Pandemic Response:
  • "Step by step, drip by drip, we can be led into true insanity. Stuff that it's almost embarrassing to look back on because none of us, whoever we are, really fought back adequately." — Walter Kirn [12:43]
• On Political Violence:
  • “We should default to a suspicion that it is the political enemies of someone acting in concert... the notion that it's always the lunatic prevents us from thinking deeply about our real predicament.” — Walter Kirn [24:11]
• On Truth and Trust:
  • "If it's too good to be true, it probably is. The obverse is also correct: If it's too bad to be true, it probably is fake." — Walter Kirn [53:25]
• On Individual Courage:
  • “You are not an insect. You do not live in a hive... You have the ability to walk alone. You have the ability to find new friends... a little bit of courage from a lot of people can change everything.” — Walter Kirn [55:31]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & “The Rash” Explained: [02:28–05:39]
• COVID’s Legacy on Society: [07:17–11:01]
• Media and Manufactured Narratives: [15:19–19:19]
• Assassinations, Groupthink, and the Lone Wolf Template: [24:11–29:29]
• Trust after the Pandemic—The “Hoaxocracy”: [50:55–53:25]
• Advice on Resisting Social Pressure: [55:31–56:24]
• Absurdity of Pandemic Measures and Mechanisms of Control: [57:13–58:31]

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Tone and Style

The conversation is sharp, candid, and often acerbic, blending skepticism, dark humor, and a clear distrust of institutional narratives. Walter Kirn delivers his thoughts with the perspective of both a novelist and a social critic, using analogy, satire, and direct challenge to mainstream thinking.

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Conclusion

This episode is a tour through the murky intersection of media, politics, pandemic psychology, and narrative construction—anchored by Walter Kirn’s provocative insights on how easily entire societies can be swayed, cajoled, and divided. Whether discussing fictional pandemics or real hysteria, the conversation urges skepticism, courage, and the re-creation of communal bonds outside imposed media structures.

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For listeners:
If you value independent thought, media literacy, and contrarian humor, this episode pulls back the curtain on the "theater" of modern life—and reminds us: think for yourself, talk to your neighbors, and beware the monster with many heads (and news tickers).

Transcript

[A]

It is. I know you're screaming and excited.

[B]

It's Beetle Mania. Ultra Mania. Ultramania.

[C]

Good morning, everyone.

[A]

Good morning. We'll give you guys a minute to filter in. And we have, like, highly, highly requested to return. Walter, let me just tell you, not only did we want you to return before you left last time, but everybody watching has been asking for you. And I was just like, you know what? There is no better time than to have Walter on with the craziness in this world.

[B]

Well, it's nice to be wanted, first of all. And second of all, the craziness is up my alley, sadly, because it's, you know, whatever else it is. Theater and theater and drama and narrative are my specialties. I never knew that the. The skills I developed as a fiction writer and as a screenplay, you know, script writer and. And a playwright would serve me so well in observing political and current events.

[A]

That's right. All right, well, listen, I. We're going to talk about the Rash on the other side, but first, let's get it going.

[D]

All you need. You don't need much. You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, jugger, flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip. Erica, I see you there. Dr. Funk. Juice. Grab your mugs. Marla, come on. Go.

[A]

Ah,

[D]

sublime.

[A]

I didn't know that was that one today. Okay, that was. That kind of freaked me out. It's like, oh, me. So, welcome to the Scott Adams school. It is April 29, 2026. I'm Erica, here with Marcella and Owen and our returning guest, professor, the Walter Kern. So, Walter, we. I just mentioned I wanted to show a trailer of the Rash. Okay, if you want to set up the trailer, and then I'll play it, and then we'll talk about it.

[B]

Sure. The Rash is a movie script that I wrote as a way of immunizing our public against future engineered hysterias like the one that I believe occurred during COVID It's a movie about a fictional pandemic, a skin disorder rather than a respiratory disorder, and all the ways in which various power centers and institutions latch onto it in order to increase their influence. And it's sort of in the tradition of Dr. Strangelove, what it did for nuclear war, or what the movie network did for TV news. The Rash attempts to do for these sweeping events which Cause us all to fall into line and put up with intolerable laws, regulations, and characters like Dr. Anthony Fauci. And though it's not a Covid drama, it is aversion. Much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers was kind of said to be a version of the Red scare in the 1950s in which everyone became. Becomes paranoid. So I moved it into the science fiction satire realm so that people would look at it not as a history or a documentary, but a vision of a society gone wrong.

[A]

Okay. All right, let's take a look. We'll come right back.

[E]

The rash is what you make it, Neil. An opportunity. A set of them. Where did it come from? Will it disappear? Is it natural or customized? Those answers are mine to give. I am the science. Future's not a thrill ride. It's calm, controlled. No more racing around, chasing adventure, excitement. We're practicing for what comes next. The world's changing. It changed some time ago. You didn't notice. Sign the letter, Neil. Join the calm. Embrace the future.

[A]

Ooh, I got goosebumps.

[B]

It's the Twilight Zone, 2026. Now, I want people to understand who just saw that trailer, that. That's called a teaser trailer. It doesn't mean that the movie has been made. In fact, the whole idea of the movie, the project itself, has been endlessly controversial. And when I showed that trailer at a gathering in Washington, D.C. a couple of months ago, I was subject to immediate attacks from Politico magazine, Yahoo News, the Hollywood Reporter, a British magazine, all in a week. Because there's something about this topic. There's something about wanting to vaccinate America's mind against future panics that someone really doesn't want to happen. And so that trailer, which is made in advance of the movie as a fundraising vehicle, and those of you out there who are multimillionaires and want to invest in the movies, find a way of getting in touch with me. This idea has already bred more resistance than any project I've ever been involved with. And it's only a script at this point.

[A]

It's a script they're afraid to see come to fruition. But I think it needs to come to fruition. There's a lot of movies. I mean, what were the movies people were watching during the pandemic? It was like Outbreak and all these other things, but they. They. You know, they also scared you, which made you like a lot of germaphobes.

[B]

But those were movies. Those were movies that were meant to. And they go back into the 90s. That were meant to prepare you for, let's say, a real epidemic, a truly terrifying epidemic. But they only added to the problem, in my view, which was that America lost its mind. It abrogated its constitutional guarantees of civil liberties across the board. It destroyed the economy for small business. All sorts of people who I think had plans for the future, plans for their business, were building, you know, building family endeavors and so on, were just taken out like with a scythe. They were mown down and for no real medical reason that we can reconstruct.

[C]

And I would add just the virus

[B]

that may have, may or may not have been the product of our own scientific establishment.

[A]

Right when the economy was chugging along beautifully in an election year and. Oh, shocking. Oh, and what were you going to say?

[C]

Well, I would just add that I think it, it damaged a generation of kids. You know, there are all sorts of kids that grew up during that time or were in school at that time that got years behind in their education. And I don't know if they really can't even catch up or at least they're struggling a lot to do that. There were, you know, kids that were emotionally affected by it just because they were kind of isolated for so long. And I think, you know, the younger kids maybe even worse, where they. That's some of the years where you're developing those emotional skills and social skills and they just missed out on that.

[A]

Oh, and not to mention those were years of indoctrination and trans becoming the new trend and returning to psycho teachers.

[B]

We were all put on the IV drip of Zoom and Apple News and so on at the expense of our social relationships, which we were told were dangerous. We were actually told that not to be hooked to your digital thumb and not to be sucking it constantly was to expose yourself to, to the danger that is real life, which was literally turned into a source of contagion. Your relatives, your neighbors, your own family. I remember. I mean, we're forgetting the craziness already. It took a long time after the Vietnam war ended for Vietnam War movies to start. But it's really time we start grappling with what went on. Because strangely, the Vietnam War, though terrible, affected soldiers most acutely. But Covid affected every single one of us. And as Owen pointed out, it affected 7 year olds trying to learn to read. If I have a solemn duty as a writer, it's to reflect back my society's sins in a way that would allow them to overcome them and not repeat their mistakes. Kids, kids have a window, a sort of a. A biological Neurological window in which their language skills are, are at, at their greatest and at their most, at their highest capacity. A lot of kids miss that window and aren't able to read as a result. That's awful.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And we always say like, never forget. But that was also another really good way, if you believe, if you guys listening happen to believe in a systematic way to try to divide a nation's people against each other. That was another really big way to witness that. I mean, friends like that, you know, shunned friends for not getting vaccinated. And, and you know, and I, and I.

[B]

They started it long before the vaccine.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Came along. They started it with their social distancing, which they later admitted Deborah Birx later admitted she made up the whole six foot distance rule. They started it with their masking and they basically caused us to fear each other at a, at a primal level. I mean, I live in a little town in Montana and you would see people swerve when another human being came down the street. You know, early on in the rash, there's a little scene in which the Stanford professor who's trying to get the word out that the thing is a hysteria that the rash might be caused by fear of the rash by scratching, not by an actual biological agent. And he's riding his bike down a path on the campus and another bike is coming along and the, in the movie they're wearing gloves instead of masks and the other biker sees he doesn't have gloves on and swerves and crashes. I mean, that is hardly an exaggeration compared to what happened. Those kids playing, you know, clarinets inside of plastic tents. And what it really showed us is that step by step, drip by drip, we can be led into true insanity. Stuff that it's almost embarrassing to look back on because none of us, whoever we are, really fought back adequately.

[A]

That's true. And you're right, it did start with fear with like you said, visual cues like the masks and the distancing and the plastic curtains and the acrylic, you know, things and whatever, the six feet and the things on the floor, the stickers stand in your little spot. And then it became, you know, did you hear Erica didn't get vaccinated? And then it's like, don't invite her to the baby shower and she can't come over to hang out. And it's like, well, you know.

[B]

Yeah, New York Times articles giving families guidelines on how to shun each other.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, at Thanksgiving. That's become of Course, an annual event in America where the news media tells us how we should comport ourselves Thanksgiving with. With wrong think relatives. But it went. It went turbo with COVID And I have this feeling that some hollowness that came during those years has never really left us. You still walk past stores or go to restaurants and you get the feeling that everything has been turned down. The intensity of life, the vigor of life, the liveliness of life has never really come back in the way one would hope it will.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of people that are still working remotely and just, you know, they're still talking about bringing people back to the office. But you've got all these empty buildings and all these big cities where nobody's going to the office anymore. Yeah, I still see people when I go to the airport wearing masks. And, you know, it's. A lot of things are just different now.

[A]

And Taylor Lorenz. Is that her name? The young journalist chick who. Oh, by the way, Walter, I want to talk about Taylor Lorenz, who was just thrilled not to. To take a left turn, but we're going to get there anyway. Who is thrilled about Luigi Mangioni shooting Brian Thompson? Is that his name? So she's. She's a psycho. Still wearing a mask. And I'm not afraid to call her a psycho because she is.

[F]

She's real nice in real life, but I know her.

[A]

So she's a psycho.

[B]

Listen, across. Across the board in the media right now, we have licensed psychos. Their job is to, as they say, widen the Overton window. Their job is to push slowly at our minds until we're willing to tolerate the intolerable and the Luigi operation. And that's what I'm going to call it, because it's not just an assassination. It is a ongoing attempt to launch a Robin Hood. Sort of a cross between Robin Hood, Beatlemania, Charles Manson, Che Guevara as a revolutionary inspiration to the young of America and, you know, an assassin with abs. And truthfully, I've been a little wild on this subject since the beginning because I'm not convinced we aren't being had about the whole thing. You know, we talk about Luigi killing someone, but we never saw that. We saw a man on a surveillance video in a hood, and we saw someone else shot in the distance. And then later we saw video from a youth hostel in which someone in a similar hood took his. Took his hood down and showed his distinctive eyebrows. And I. When I see something take the form of the first episode of HBO series in which characters are revealed in which the, the main, the star is shown in increasingly sexy and appealing ways, getting you, you know, drawn into their sort of erotic trance. I sit back and go, am I watching tv? People think that that means that I'm one of these guys who thinks everything's a hoax or a fraud or so on. And it's not quite that you can take real elements. You can take things that happen and by framing them, and this was Scott's, of course, genius to teach America that this was possible. By framing them correctly and by putting them in a certain order and by adding commentary and then by bringing in secondary characters who comment on it and lead our thinking, we can turn it into a miniseries. And that's exactly what's happened. This morning I saw a, a video from Maine from a congressional candidate, I believe, at an audience of, you know, likely voters or supporters talking about what are we going to do with health care when we don't have enough Luigi Mangiones out there to solve the problem for us. We have, right up until this week mainstreamed assassination using this incredibly appealing man. It's, you know, who, who's, whose sexual and, and sort of personal charms have been pushed on us constantly, even on late night tv. And, you know, I support Lubigi such that when a gunman comes running into the White House Correspondents dinner the other night, there is a contingent of Americans

[A]

that cheer for him, of course.

[B]

And that was the purpose of the whole thing. You will never change my mind on this. It has been deliberate. And whether or not the underlying event, the original assassination, is as we believe it to be, it is inarguable that the contextualizing of the event has been a superhero movie for sickos.

[A]

And let's not forget, please, ever, what happened to Charlie Kirk. And we watched them cheer. Okay, so we've been led down the garden path.

[B]

Yeah, this is a kind of, this is a kind of digital 1960s, you know, and, and I'm old enough, unfortunately, or fortunately to remember the very end of the 1960s. I was born in 1962 and 69 or 68, when, when the assassinations peaked, when we lost Martin Luther King, when we lost Bobby Kennedy, when we, you know, and there were others. We forget about, you know, Malcolm X a little earlier in the, in the decade and of course JFK. And then we had two assassination attempts on Gerald Ford in the mid-70s. Well, I remember how that felt as a child. And it looked to me that my society was fragile, unraveling, volatile and almost irrecoverably. Divided. And now with the powers of social media to, you know, create narratives overnight, create substories, create what they call stickiness, such that you find some element of the story endlessly engaging. You know, they have run a replay of that.

[A]

Mm. Yeah. And, you know, it's just. They haven't. And this time, you know, the incident at Butler, which, you know, I could do a whole other show on, like, what I thought about that, but people pretended for a little while to care. The people that have dialed everything up pretended to care. This incident. Actually, I'm going to play this clip for you, for all of you, and then I want to react to it, because after this one, they didn't even pretend to try to turn down the heat and the rhetoric. They. They are just doubling down. So I. I already did my cursing in the green room, you guys, with Owen. I said every expletive I needed to about Chuck Todd, but this clip just sends me. Okay, let's. Let's listen.

[G]

I'm not going to any more events where Trump's at him. I don't feel safe. Wherever Donald Trump, chaos follows him. Chaos follows him. And you are less safe. Right. If you decide to go into his orbit, you have put. You have become less safe. If you. He's just. He does not care about your safety. He's not going to protect you if you go into his orbit, because he's always going to protect himself first. He's more likely to throw you under the.

[B]

Oh, my God. He's more likely safe that during COVID

[G]

if you're John Bolton or Mike Pompeo and he's going to pull any sort of federal support. Right. You know, I think about when somebody using Donald Trump's words and actions targeted me and bunch of other. You know who I didn't hear from Donald Trump. Right. So the guy doesn't care when people commit violence in his name. He only cares when the violence is committed against him. And he does not.

[B]

Oh, my God. He's. He's equating being attacked journalism with being assassinated.

[F]

What.

[B]

What a fool.

[A]

First of all, thank you.

[B]

Do you think that that's not scripted? Look at those two guys. They're agreeing so hard, their heads are gonna merge. I mean, they're gonna break through the screen and make love with their noses. They're agreeing so hard. Listen to what this man just said. He just said all of COVID that getting near Donald Trump is a form of contagion because you might yourself be collateral damage in an Iranian assassination attempt. Well, first of All. Who said anything about Iranians? What? Where did you get that? Second of all, you are saying that a journalist yourself who is supposed to be an intrepid person, not like the rest of us. I mean, yeah, maybe you don't want to put your 7 year olds in harm's way, but Chuck, isn't your job to go where others are afraid to go. But you won't even go to a damn party. Now my friend Michael Kelly, who was a former editor of the Atlantic, died in the early days of the Iraq war. He decided that since this was a war that he personally supported and wanted to report on, he should be there with the troops at the beginning. And he was killed. Chuck Todd won't go to a fricking Hilton hotel. These people are fools. And why we're still listening to them, you know, I mean, we're not listening to him as often or as loudly because he's come down vastly in the world. World. But why after Covid we are using this same cohort to inform ourselves about our reality is baffling to me.

[A]

And never acknowledging that they're the ones that spewed all the bullshit that put us in these positions. I mean, there's never any self awareness ever. It's insanity.

[B]

But let me, let me put an asterisk there. It has become the conventional wisdom after these assassination attempts that these figures were radicalized by the media and are lone wolves who just sort of got hypnotized or entranced by the Chuck Todds of the world and then went off the rails and did some crazy thing. Only in America do we believe that political violence is the work of psychotics. If you hear about assassination attempts on an Italian leader, say, or someone else abroad, you assume that there is a political motive and perhaps a plot involved. But here in America, we have used the Lee Harvey Oswald template to make every single one of these events look like a one off, crazy ass, you know, somebody snapped story. I think that that's misleading. I, I actually think that using Occam's razor, we should, we should default to a suspicion that it is the political enemies of someone acting in concert and maybe in a way that involves priority planning and then media response in a coordinated fashion afterward that that's what's happening. I'm getting really tired of these little crazy manifestos coming out after these crimes and us deciding that the person just snapped and they were a lunatic and so on. That causes us to stop asking questions. And especially when our, especially when our prejudices are confirmed. Oh, this guy watched Too much snbc. Well, maybe it wasn't watching too much MSNBC that caused this. Maybe Trump has real enemies. Maybe the powerful who had tried to take him out through Russiagate and other legal maneuvers and endless trials and perhaps tricky election schemes, and Covid even possibly, maybe they are also working behind the scenes here. We at least have to consider it. And this. This nutty thought that it's always the lunatic, I think, prevents us from thinking deeply about our real predicament.

[A]

Yeah, I don't think this guy's a lunatic. I mean, he had plenty of time to think out what he was doing, how he was going to get himself there. I'll take the train, obviously, a plane. I've got knives, I've got guns. You know, get there early, scope out the joint. Like, this wasn't like a person. Like, you know, he did run in like a lunatic, but it wasn't like, you know, he just snapped. He. He took time. If he. If he wrote this manifesto, everything's an if, because we can't trust anything anymore.

[B]

Listen, we just found out. We just found out the week. A week ago, and I think that this event has been vastly underappreciated as a watershed moment for America. We just found out that the Southern Poverty Law center, our premier police organization for cultural, you know, cultural opposition to hatred, was secretly sneaking millions of dollars out the back door to the very people that it claims to be opposing. And frankly, that trial is going to be one of the trials I want to watch most in my life, because we will see these techniques now, having Lear that having learned that NGO with $800 million in the bank was funneling money to people involved with Charlottesville. You know, one of Scott's favorite topics. Are we. Are we going to revert to the naive belief that this guy just got on a train? Do you know how hard it is to evade the detective and surveillance capabilities of modern America? I mean, right now? And when we get off, we'll get on our phones and all that data will be collected, all of it will be scrutinized. If we are under suspicion for anything, or if we're considered politically dangerous. The idea that people can do things alone in this society, rent hotel rooms, cross the country, buy weapons, and burst into huge events at which half the Cabinet, the Vice president and the president. I mean, not since the Lincoln assassination, which attempted to take out the whole top tier of the government, have we had a plan which attempted to do the same that I know of. And so I think we're being really led along by the nose when we think this is. This is likely one.

[A]

Yeah. So, Walter, that's. You brought something up. That's a big concern and question for me that I've been talking about lately. So why were. Why was everybody who makes important decisions in this White House, in this administration, in the room for the White House correspondence dinner of all events? They all had to go there. And when we. I don't want to say we. When our government dropped the first bomb in Iran, it was because they knew all of those officials were together in a building and they said, let's get them all at once. So who decides of all these people? Yeah, we need Tulsi Cash Patel, Pete Hegseth Vance, the president keep. I mean, Bessen, rfkj. Like, why were they all in one room together and for this, I'm sorry, stupid event?

[B]

I have no idea. Especially since Trump avoided it the last couple of years. You know, he. He didn't go to this dinner, and then suddenly they all show up, Erica and everybody who's listening. I'm completely willing to be the lone lunatic on this topic. I don't think we understand anymore and have very good sources of information on the events that shape our politics. It is as likely that this guy was sponsored by others as it is that he acted alone. Why Trump and his entire cabinet decided to show up for a low security dinner at a Hilton with their proven adversaries in the press is a bit of a mystery. Some of these mysteries will be partly solved, but at this point, I think any attempt to analyze them must run up against the notion that we don't know much and that past events like Covid, like January 6th, like all sorts of watershed moments, have turned out to be not as they appeared, and this will turn out to be not as it appeared. That's all I know. All I know is that I know very little. And all I know is that the forces of distortion and deception have never been more active or more skilled. And so to live in a society where you resign yourself to the fact that the theater you're watching obscures theater you can't. Obscures realities you can't imagine is tough. But I think we have to get there if we want to be mature.

[A]

Yeah. Marcela, did you want to chime in? I'm just, like, rambling on over here.

[F]

You know, I was thinking something that you just said, Erica, about how Iran gathered all of their, you know, I don't know what you call them, moolahs or generals into one room, and we were able to bomb the hell out of it and were able to, you know, kill Khomeini or however you pronounce his name. But I was thinking maybe it was a sign, like maybe it was planned, that everybody would be there in the White House correspondence dinner as a. As a show to Iran that their. Their security and we're not afraid and we have all of the weapons. You know, like Trump was saying, we completely demised you, Iran. And maybe it was sort of a showing to them as well that could be, you know, like, we can gather together and there would be no issue. However, you know, this. This guy.

[A]

And then everybody's like, there was no security here.

[B]

Because I'm a novelist, I think a little differently than others. I think of stories that would hang together if they weren't true. And I speculate and I sort of use a multiverse model, and then I compare the different possible dramas with each other and see how well they suit the facts and how well they suit the times and how well they suit the known motivations of the various players in our society. I think it's perfectly possible that this plot was partly known, that this threat was partly understood. I find it outlandish to think that these people place themselves in harm's way in this fashion on. On hostile territory. Now, of course, we've got half these people on Blue sky going, oh, it was all. It was all a stunt created to foster support for the White House ballroom. I mean, one of the problems in a time when you don't know what's true is that things that are real appear to be fake, and things that are fake appear to be real. And I think this is a case of something real appearing to many to be fake. Just last week, before this even happened, there was a huge surge on social media among some kind of August people of Butler, Pennsylvania, denialism. You know, it's very strange how social media seems to prepare us for events. And just a week ago, we were finding out how many people thought that the Butler assassination attempt was fake. And here we get another one. There's also a possibility that this wasn't meant to succeed, that this was a stunt meant to authorize people like Chuck Todd to start scaring everybody such that Trump can't go out and campaign this fall, you know, such that people are afraid to be at his events. What Chuck said had no basis in what actually happened. He said that you, as a supporter, as an American citizen, are in harm's way if you are around Trump and journalists are in harm's way now, have we had one assassination attempt that has harmed a journalist recently, not that I know of, but we did in the Trump Butler case, have a fireman who was killed and other who were wounded. And so this sounds to me like an attempt to launch a meme. There's a blast zone around Trump. You know how you get those little maps of the nuclear bomb drops here and then at this radius, everybody, you know, everybody dies within a day. At this radius, they all get cancer. They're trying to create, they're trying to create a map around Trump of danger. If you're in his physical proximity, you might get hit by a bullet. If you're on, you know, the next ring out, you might get hit by a bomb or a terrorist, you know, with, with a automatic weapon. This is absolutely trans. Transparent what they're doing. They're trying to make this man Covid toxic. They're recommending social distancing. Again, that's exactly what they're doing. Socially distance yourself from battle because you might get shrapnel.

[C]

Well, and they're, they're not even hiding the fact that if they get power again, they're going to start the impeachments and they're promising to punish in jail anybody who was working with Trump. I mean, that's all over the place. They're not, they're not hiding that. They're saying that they want to go after every single person that worked in the Trump administration.

[B]

Trump's adversaries have made one mistake, and I think it will turn out to be a strategic and ruinous error for them. They've left him nothing to lose. Yeah, nothing to lose. They've, they've demonized him. And I mean, in a way that's unique in my, in my experience as, as a modern American, they have at least minimized attempts on his life if not been gleeful about them. I mean, Jimmy Kimmel goes on network nightly comedy TV and says, Melania Trump has the glow of an expectant widow.

[A]

Ha ha, ha.

[B]

You know, they have also, in a way, I think, by not leaving him anything to lose, licensed him to take ultimate action. If it's no kings that they fear that they want, if it's Hitler that they fear, why place a man in a position in which he has absolutely nothing to lose by trying to use his power to the maximum. And, you know, I think it was a big mistake. Leaving Trump a carrot, leaving him some room to kind of please people and do as they wished would, I think have been wiser than cornering him literally at gunpoint while he has the power of the presidency. And you know, everybody's talking about lame ducks in American politics, in American presidencies, being powerless. In fact, lame ducks, if they choose to embrace the fact that they no longer have to win an election, are incredibly powerful. They just have to embrace the freedom. And I think if I were Donald Trump, I would be doing just that. I wouldn't care if my approval ratings dropped a negative 7. I don't need votes anymore. And the conventional wisdom is that the president's party always loses the midterms. So who gives a damn about that either? As for impeachment, it already happened twice. Things that have happened to you twice already. Let's say divorces cause you not to fear the third one. And so I think we're about to see the rampage, and I think it has been stealthily prepared. We're starting to see Covid figures indicted. We're seeing James Comey indicted for a second time in a state, North Carolina, where, you know, he doesn't have his fanboys as he does in D.C. or Virginia. Yeah, and I'm prepared for a bit of a, how can I put it, Bruce Lee movie, a karate movie in which you get the guy down, you know, in the corner of the big temple and the whole army is surrounding him. And all of a sudden,

[A]

I love that analogy. What do you think? I know, You know, well, and also I always keep bringing up, he's only got two years left. Like, calm down, people. You know, it's like if, if he's a, a lame duck and he only has two years left, what's the problem? Like, what are you so afraid of now? All right, so I have a question

[B]

for nothing left to lose said Chris Christopherson and Janis Joplin.

[A]

Let's go. All right, so I listen, let's, let's watch. Every time I say listen, I now picture Michael Malice saying back to me, no, you listen. Okay, so I want to play a clip because I. But I don't know who I'm more excited about because part of me feels like nothing's gonna happen anyway. But I didn't know if I should go with Comey or with this clip. But let's go with this clip and then talk about it.

[B]

Former top advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci now facing criminal charges. This over an alleged cover up involving research into the origins of COVID Rich Edson on this story.

[C]

Intriguing.

[B]

Rich, what you find out there in Washington?

[H]

It is, Bill. The Justice Department has charged David Morens, a doctor, with conspiracy, claiming he Concealed federal records to counter evidence that COVID 19 may have leaked from a lab in China, all to help restore a controversial coronavirus. Grant Morens, a former aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, testified before the House's Covid select subcommittee nearly two years ago about emails he'd sent in February 2021, claiming that he'd learned to make emails disappear after he received Freedom of Information act requests.

[B]

Ever delete or attempt to delete a federal record? No, but let me explain why. When I came there in 1998, we were instructed to delete emails or to move them into PST files frequently because they jammed the computer.

[H]

The justice department says Morens used his personal Gmail account to exchange non public information. The indictment also claims an unnamed co conspirator gave Morens wine for his quote, behind the scenes shenanigans, then suggested he could push scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID 19 had natural origins. That's a competing claim with the lab leak theory. The indictment says the co conspirator could also provide meals at top restaurants in Paris, New York and Washington, DC. In April 2020, the NIH terminated that BAT Coronavirus Grant awarded to EcoHealth alliance, who then contracted the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct that research in China. From the start of the pandemic, its president, Peter Daszak, worked to discredit any theory that COVID 19 had leaked from that lab. Okay.

[B]

All right. Thank you, Rich. More to come. Rich Hudson, on that story from Washington.

[A]

Oh, Walter, just take it away.

[B]

You know, this is being construed as some sort of minor charge. You hid some records. He. He falsified some information. The entire pyramid of COVID Of COVID tyranny was built on false information. Had America known at the beginning that what they were dealing with was a. What was an engineered virus with American fingerprints on it from a Chinese lab, not some dreaded primal pathogen from a cave full of vampire bats. They weren't vampire bats, but the implications sounds better. You know, they were things we should be afraid of in a horror movie way. Had that information been early and accurate and not hidden and not concealed. We would not have worshiped Anthony Fauci. We would not have followed any of these people. We would not have. We would have demanded truth from our government rather than let them tell us what to do. We would have, had, frankly, a rebellion. Because if the virus had been as serious as they told us it was. Because remember the. There were vastly inflated statistics about its, you know, death rate and its, you Know, seriousness. But had it been that serious, and we found out that this thing came from Eco Health alliance and Dr. Ralph Baric and the University of North Carolina and the labs of the US government all working through China. What? Who knew that we had a partnership with the Chinese biowarfare labs? We would have had. We'd be living in a different world right now.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you know, it all starts with a lie. It all starts with a lie. And the lies are small, but when they compound with interest over time, they become trillion dollar lies. And this was one of the them. So throw the book at him, get it as on the record as possible, push him to sing, because he was by far. He was far from alone. You don't just freelance these kind of lies. He obviously had an entire department that was laughing along with him and complicit and who he felt he could just sort of jokingly say, hey, I figured out a way to. It made things go away. Wait a second. That's institutional. That bureaucratic across the board, deception and rot. I want to see them. I want to see them all in the dock. Because if your limo company that did weddings, like a guy I met down in Austin, Texas, was ruined overnight by the fact that there weren't weddings anymore, you kind of want to know why this guy is still walking around and you're digging ditches and you know, if

[A]

he's lying, okay, there's 50 people that know he's lying that are also in on it. And maybe because they all know the lies that each one of them are telling. Because if Fauci was, you know, up and up, which he's not, my opinion, and he heard, you know, I have to say, my opinion, or Marcelo will, you don't need.

[B]

You don't need a pardon that goes back to 2014 if you're on the

[A]

up and up, right? I mean, they all know each other's lives.

[B]

Covers all possible sins.

[C]

Well, I mean, there's some things that, you know, maybe people don't immediately connect the dots on. Like if all this is true, that it was an engineered virus, it was those people murdered millions of people, right? Like that's biological warfare. That's against all sorts of laws, everything. But they murdered millions of people and

[A]

then damaged bazillions of people with this vaccine.

[C]

And then if this was all engineered, then where my mind goes and went at the time, because I suspected it was engineered. So I was thinking about this at the time, but, like, we started with what, the Alpha strain, and then this really bad Delta strain came out, and no one really knew exactly how it mutated into this really, you know, deadly strain. And then not long after, it got completely replaced with this Omicron that was much less deadly. And, you know, I mean, like, where did these things come from? If the original one came out of a lab, then maybe every single strain came out of a lab and it was all deliberate when they released them.

[B]

But the entire litany of events that you just recited came through polluted channels and scientists who lie. So you don't know that all this Delta Omicron rhetoric that you were fed was fed to you by the same people who lied in the first place. So the truth is that if you were in a criminal trial where a witness has caught lying early in their testimony, why the hell would you recite the rest of their testimony as somehow legitimate? Trustworthy or not, we are completely 100% in the dark about the very fundamental nature of this pandemic.

[C]

I understand. I can't trust any of what they tell us, but I do think that, like, I'm just saying that there's an implication there that if they engineered this thing, even if it was an accidental release when it first came out, I would imagine, then they're saying, okay, how do we manage this? Right? Like, that's. How do we cover this up? But not only that, but how do we keep this from.

[B]

By telling the damn truth is how you control. If it was an accident, then they tell the truth about it, like supposedly the Soviets would have done about Chernobyl had they not been a communist bureaucracy. We're no better than, apparently, they were with Chernobyl. If, in fact, our first instinct was to lie about an accident, if it wasn't an accident, then something much graver

[A]

happened, and then to lie about the treatment. I wanted to ask you, Walter, for some advice. So, you know, a lot of us, I get the fear. You know, I was afraid at first. I was like, oh, my God, you know, what are we doing? I got to get extra peanut butter. I don't know why. And I need gloves. And, you know, I'm like, ordering from Amazon when this thing was starting ahead of the curve. Actually, I was watching what was happening in China, and I'm like, I got to start getting things into my house now.

[B]

What was happening in China by. What were you watching?

[A]

I was watching the videos. They were showing videos of people toppling

[B]

over in train stations.

[A]

That's right. You thought that real? I. I didn't know. I didn't know in the beginning, but I quickly Listened. I am the most skeptical person. I am a fearful person in the beginning. And then. Then this is what I was going to ask you for the advice. So then, you know, you guys, I. I just want us to remember because there. Everything. Look at the hoax list we created with Scott, right? All the hoaxes. Look at the Southern Poverty Law Center. I mean, they're. They're creating hoaxes to prove a point that the people on the right are racist.

[B]

Okay, Erica, we live in a hoaxocracy.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

In fact, it's very hard to find any of these events that on real scrutiny, stand up. And Covid is the biggest of them all. And, And I didn't mean to embarrass you, but when I. But when I point out that your fear was based on what smuggled surveillance videos from child of people falling like timber forest trees onto the floor. And that was the basis. Wow, we are really vulnerable. We are really vulnerable if a bunch of crap TikTok videos can send us into paroxysms of panic. And the reason that that rash movie of mine is, I think, gaining such opposition is that they don't want us aware of how easily fooled we are. Because it was now, in retrospect, a comedy, that those stupid videos caused a country to lock itself indoors.

[A]

Oh, yeah. So I watched those videos at first, like everybody was, and I was like, oh, I'll get prepared. I don't know what this is. I. I am really proud to say that I did not get vaccinated. I did not, you know, like, I had to do a couple of tests because I was flying somewhere. Otherwise I wouldn't have. I quickly fell out of the whole right thing because this is what I wanted to say. If you could just help us with advice. Because what I was seeing was, okay, so I can't do anything. I can't see my sick and dying father. You can't sing Happy Birthday to your kid because singing Happy Birthday will make everyone sick. The whole thing, however, you can pour across our border and not get a vaccine as you're pouring across the border and just get let off into the middle of the country, no problem. You can riot, you can burn your cities down, you can lewd, you can beat people up and you can scream in the streets, no problem. But everybody else, six feet apart, put your mask on. So my thing I was going to ask you, Walter, is like, can you talk to us about just like, the common sense of it? Because that's kind of all I see now is like, well, wait, like, this is what I have to do. But everything else is not a problem. So how serious is this?

[B]

Can I leave you with a quotable piece of advice on this? There's an old saying, if it's too good to be true, it probably is. Well, the obverse is also correct. If it's too bad to be true, it probably is fake. In other words, if the world is ending on the basis of some surveillance videos from China that got here by some mysterious fashion and were shown on the news shows of proven liars, it's probably not true. Listen, if all of America had had a power outage for two weeks and there would have been no cnn, you know, no Internet and so on, we probably would have been better off than informing ourselves. We've gotten to the point where if it comes through a polluted channel, don't listen. The risk of getting something wrong is low. The risk of being recruited for a massive mass formation operation that will ruin your society is high. Whenever you see these people talking in concert, whenever you see that matrix like array of screens and words like safety and so on coming out of many mouths at once, you are looking at the Greek monster known as the Gorgon with, you know, many heads, many eyes, and turn away. If it's too bad to be true, it probably isn't.

[A]

So now what's your advice to the people that might be hearing this, that are not afraid, but afraid of the scrutiny from the other people who are falling for it? And I'm going to be castigated for my group and I'm going to be shunned, and no one's, like, for me, my answer is like, so what? Who cares, right? Like, I don't care.

[B]

Don't talk to me. Is, you are not an insect. You do not live in a hive. You're a primate who stands on two feet and can use tools and has a brain. If you were me. If you want to reduce yourself to the level of an ant in an anthill or a bee in a hive, go ahead. But you have taken all of your evolutionary advantages and thrown them away. You have the ability to walk alone. You have the ability to find new friends. If social life and fitting into the group is your final value, then go to a ranch, jump the fence and join the cowherd grazing in the pasture. Walk around on all fours. My lord, a little bit of courage from a lot of people can change everything.

[A]

Yes, talk to your neighbors, you guys. You know, that's what we were saying this the other day. You know, if we, if we all for the people who were like, you know what? I'm not buying into this, and I'm not doing this. If you. If more of us had talked to our neighbors and people, like, about our thought and idea, maybe they would have felt brave also, like, oh, you know what? All right, so maybe I was nervous about this, but Erica feels this way, and I feel this way, and I'm going to talk to someone else, and maybe enough of us could get the

[B]

little cyclone going, the real effect. And I would even say the intent of lockdowns was to keep people from comparing notes, because if you can compare notes and you're willing to take that dangerous trip to your neighbor's front door, you can learn a lot.

[C]

Yeah. And certainly Scott played a big role of that during that time, calming us all down and keeping us from getting panicked. And I certainly took note of all the policies being so inconsistent, where it's like, you can eat in a restaurant, you got to wear a mask until you get to your table, but then you can take it off. And we got to close down all the gyms, and you can't go outside and exercise, and you can't go to church, but you can go to a strip club. And, like, there were these weird rules where it's like somebody's deciding what's essential. All the big businesses get to stay open, but the small businesses have to close.

[A]

Wait, you could go to a strip club? I didn't know.

[C]

I'm pretty sure they let them stay open. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

[B]

There's a technique. When invading armies come into a. A conquered territory, they gather up all the people and they give them a bunch of contradictory orders, ones that make no sense, ones that don't harmonize. And the people who follow them are the people that they decide are the most conquered. And the people who say raise their hand and go, wait, I can go to strip clubs, but I can't go to church. Those are the people you get rid of, the people who stand up. Well, enough people have to stand up that they can't be getting rid of us all.

[A]

I agree, Walter. Okay, first, this picture. I'm obsessed. I almost want to hang it on my wall.

[B]

That was taken by my beautiful wife, Amanda Fortini. And when I put. When she put it up on Twitter or I did, she said, you didn't credit me, so I'm crediting her here.

[A]

Well, it's an amazing picture. I love how the drapes work with the chair, with. Work with the lining of your jacket. Then I like the offset print of the carpet. I like that. Your white shirt with the tablecloth with the white bedspread all works. Your ring is either. Can quickly look like a ring or perhaps like you have a cigarette, like an old, like, James Dean vibe. Your hair is the perfect color with everything. I like the Fiji bottle. I like all of it. I've really studied.

[B]

None of it was staged. God took that photo through my wife. But I will tell you that anybody who sees me on Twitter, I want you to imagine me on the other end of the Twitter transmission doing in this pose, because usually I'm just, you know, looking.

[A]

You're forever.

[C]

I think I need to start a rumor that it was all staged.

[A]

You can't.

[B]

That's the only way to get attention nowadays. So do it, please.

[A]

That's a perfect photo. I love it. All right, so you're on Gutfeld. What night are you on?

[B]

Friday, May Day. International Workers Day. You know, the day when we all dance around the pool. I picked Springs, you know, Capital Day for my return to Gutfeld. I've been writing a book. I've had all kinds of difficulties that aren't worth going into, and so I haven't been on the show for a while and I'll come roaring back on Friday.

[A]

Well, tell Greg that we're going to be looking for him on the Scott Adams School. Have a great appearance. We'll all be watching. And thank you so, so much for coming on with us again today. Like, we. We just cherish you and value.

[B]

I was ferocious today, and I. And I apologize. I only have an hour here, and so I just roared through it.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. Don't ever apologize. You're amazing. We, we really appreciate you. Marcela and Owen, thank you so much. And. And the three of us thank everybody watching this and for tuning in. We always give a thanks to Scott and Shelly for letting the show go on. And a closing sip. We always ask you to be useful as Scott was. And a closing sip to Scott. You guys say your goodbyes and we'll all be back tomorrow morning. Okay? Thank you, Walter.

[B]

Thank you.

[C]

To Scott. Be useful.

[A]

Go get them. Alter.

[B]

Oh, and I'm sorry I interrupted you. I was. I went on a tear. But, you know, you have the greatest.