No Party For Thinking Men: A Few Thoughts on Scott Adams (and Matt Gaetz)
A friend weighs in on Scott Adams's turn
A friend of mine weighed in. My comments are interspersed.
Dear Charles:
I confess that I was a taken aback by your column on Scott Adams. I listened to Adams virtually every day from the Spring of 2020 until the Summer of 2022. My job allowed me plenty of time to listen to podcasts and I loved to start my shift with the “Simultaneous Sip”. A 75 cent McDonad’s coffee never tasted so good.
My first reaction to your assertion about Adams was that you had taken this one a little too far. An Op under every bed?
But when I started to think back, I began to have second thoughts. You might be on to something.
Why did I listen to Adams so often? For starters, he was a voice of fairly calm reason in a crazy time. He takes time to discuss issues. He is a libertine libertarian boomer optimist who thinks everything will work out all right. He has a good sense of humor and he looks at issues in ways I don’t. Half the time I agree. Half not. In particular, his analysis of persuasion in the public square was always compelling. For example, he thinks that AOC is the best persuader/communicator on the Left. After Jack Dorsey pulled Trump off Twitter, Adams analyzed the statement Dorsey made. Adams thought it was pretty effective.
His careful analysis ended whenever he brought up the Middle East. His pro-Israel views might embarrass even the Likud. He rejoiced when Jared worked out those treaties (contracts?) with the Gulf States arguing that this proved you could bypass the Palestinians. He did a particularly wicked impression of John Kerry stating that you could not get peace in the Middle East without resolving the Palestinian question. He was particularly belligerent about Iran. It somehow did not fit.
His bellicose attitude towards China was another thing. The Fentanyl overdose which killed his stepson came up all the time. He blamed the Chinese. Adams wanted to bomb their factories, even end all trade. The probable Wuhan origins of the Covid virus gave him another club.
Personal tragedy often makes is ideal for recruitment. We are allowed in a certain sense to suspend our rational side when we experience tragedy. Add to that Adams’s second divorce and you have fertile ground for recruitment. Some of us really are online way too much. The information doorway of the Internet allows in all kinds of miscreants.
To read Patrick Radden Keefe’s very good book on the Sacklers — Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty — is to know that this has been a long running project.
I am a WASP member in good standing of the “Save the American Redneck” association which is why I oppose the fentanyl, Fox News, the Afghanistan/Iraq Wars and other forms of poisoning and hypnosis.
These foreign policy positions were out of sync with the tone of his other work. It was not his voice, so to speak.
So. What was the trip wire?
May I suggest that it was Adam’s reaction to the DOJ investigation of Matt Gaetz. From the very start, Adams was skeptical. He kept saying “Where is the girl”. He realized how serious an attack this was on Gaetz. And said: "If he survives this, he will be President." (Remember. He accurately predicted Trump in 2015). This came up in show after show. He demanded evidence and got none.
Adams clearly sided with Gaetz.
Given what you have said about the Gaetz affair, was that Adams’ death sentence?
I’ve often wondered about what really happened here and I ping back and forth between different explanations based upon my mood. The heroic version I’ve settled on is that Adams was committing suicide by telling me what was going on with the op against Matt Gaetz. I promptly told Gaetz and then the FBI as I suspect Adams must have known I would.
There are a considerable Republicans who got the Netanyahu politics very wrong. This is a shanda, to borrow a phrase. One gets the sense that Netanyahu hates the very Republicans who bend the knee to him and who could blame him? There’s a certain sense in which he can’t help but do dafke to them and their goyishe kopf, or gentile brains.
To reset the relationship with Israel means thinking clearly about it but there are quite a lot of people who can’t be allowed to think at all. To think is to notice what’s happened to the sense making capabilities of the Grand Old Party. There is a culling going on, particularly of anyone with any ties to the Old America, and it is accelerating.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that there’s a steady assassination of thinking people within the Republican Party. To the extent that there are any brains at all within the GOP it is as coalition of (closeted) gay men, plodding Mormons, and Jews. Each of these groups have been under considerable pressure in recent years. The gays have been liberated by bourgeoisie norms and gay marriage, which has become a kind of prison for them. The Mormons have been exposed and their money has been well corralled. The Romneys have been forced to be Senators and RNC chairs but that’s as far as that’ll be allowed to go. The Jews are slowly but surely no longer sending their best. Jared Kushner ain’t it no matter what fellow Likudniks Maggie Haberman and Ken Vogel may want to tell us. Now, in the height of ironies we may well have to get rid of Bibi to save the Republican Party. He is in some sense the very mob boss—the boss of bosses running the party today. But he is aging and he is losing.
All of which is to say that I suspect the real reason that Scott Adams took off is that he was a thinking man who flattered the relatively low status Republicans who had a romantic sensibility when it came to Donald Trump. It’s nice to be wanted. The old saw about how the left burns heretics and the right praises converts is true. But the right burns its share too and I have the singe marks to prove it.
Yes, I dream of a more just Israeli-American alliance and I’m not the only one. It’s time end Israel’s other occupation.
While it is tempting to think of political parties needing brains they also need voters and money. A way to think of the Republican Party in this low interest rate environment is that it was a coalition of Scotch-Irish who wanted low taxes, Germans who wanted an industrial policy, and Jewish-American tech and real estate oligarchs. If you squint you’ll notice that not a few of those coalition members are fronts for the mob.
President Joe Biden called the bluff by offering factories to the Rust Belt. But the more seditious thing Biden did was the Chips Act — $53 billion to take back electrical engineering from the Chinese while borrowing money from the Chinese. This is William Shockley’s revenge and it’s a subject we will turn to at a later date.
These chips are going to be part of powering an American renaissance and their supply will create its own demand. We will find new uses for them as we delve further into Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law. “The cameras will get smaller, cheaper, more numerous and more mobile every year,” futurist David Brin writes. The cameras will be used to keep everyone honest and they’ll go into satellites and genome sequencers and facial recognition processing.
As for Adams and Gaetz I am waiting for my friends to return but I sense they got very lost. I’ll keep the light on for them all the same though I might go to bed. Who knows if they’ll turn up.
Scott Adams has a rule, too — that you get to take back any comments you say. I wish he would invoke it. And I wish Gaetz wouldn’t take the justifiable anger he feels toward American law enforcement cloud his judgment.
I really love that paragraph that starts out with “there is a assasination of thinking American people in the Conservative party ..... etc... proceeds to go on with really revealing perspective which I admire Charles for, probably the best unique trait I really admire along with the impossibly overwhelming ability to convey info with supporting data that seems impossible to remember from my account