You can’t trust anything Scott Adams tells you. However, this isn’t because he tells lies (he doesn’t). It’s because Adams always has an angle. He’s a trained hypnotist and expert in the use and analysis of persuasion….. and he’s using these skills on you all the time [1]

The stated purpose of Win Bigly is to explain to you the persuasion skills Donald Trump used to win the US Presidential Election of 2016 against overwhelming odds, and for Adams to explain what he saw that enabled him to be one of the few pundits to predict a Trump win far in advance.

The actual purpose of Win Bigly is for Scott Adams to preen, run a victory lap, and position himself as a recognised expert so that you take him more seriously in future. The book is non-stop “look at how awesomely I predicted this” cloaked in false modesty, written with an obsessive self-interest in Scott Adams the man and what he was concerned about at each stage, rather than Trump, or the US generally. [2]

I actually admire that he did this. Win Bigly is a textbook example of watching a persuader at work, if you can run a meta-level read of it at the same time as a normal read. I started following Scott Adams’ blog in late 2015, after Mike Cernovich linked it, right through to months after the inauguration. Adam’s “Master Persuader” ideas were innovative, illuminating, and often accurately predictive. He deserves his current popularity.

However, he’s completely wrong. I wouldn’t say he’s a bullshitter – he makes too many falsifiable predictions for that label to be fair – but he often runs close to it. There are so many good ideas in Scott’s work that I needed to be very careful in analysing him while reading, holding everything in a mental quarantine as I work through their implications and decide what can be allowed into my world-view versus what is poison. He sings a convincing siren song.

The subtitle of the book explains the main thesis: Persuasion in a world where facts don’t matter. Adams wants us to use what he names the Persuasion Filter, filter being his re-branding of the common word ‘perspective’. He says humans are ‘moist robots’ that can be programmed to think certain ways if a persuader knows how to communicate to them. Donald Trump is a master persuader, utilising an incredible talent stack of skills to communicate very effectively. Much of the book is outlining this talent stack and explaining key examples.

And the whole time, Adams is using those same skills on you. For example, Adams explains ‘strategic ambiguity’ as a tactic whereby you are purposefully vague about a policy idea so that groups with mutually exclusive wants can all support you because each reads into the ambiguity what they wish to see. Really, this is an old PUA tactic of letting girls fill in the blanks, knowing they’ll fill them with traits of her ideal man that you might not possess.

For example, when Trump says “we need to take our country back” it’s an ambiguous statement. Who is ‘we’, what does he mean by ‘our country’ and taking it back from whom? A white nationalist may read this as taking back WASP America from the multi-culturalists and then deporting non-whites. A civic nationalist may read it as removing globalist influence and the foreign bribery at the Chamber Of Commerce. A coal miner in Pennsylvania could read it as a need to get out of the Paris Climate Accord and a business owner may read it as getting out of TPP and NAFTA.

Adams is using strategic ambiguity on the reader constantly.

He wants you to believe he only wrote positively about Trump’s persuasion skills but he didn’t agree with any of either candidate’s policy positions. Then he endorsed Hillary, then Gary Johnson, then Trump. Yeah, I’d say that’s covering the bases. He wants you to believe facts don’t matter, but then often slides into explaining how facts do matter.

As a work of philosophy Win Bigly is solipsistic, immature, dishonest, and self-aggrandising. But of course it’s not a work of philosophy. It’s a work of persuasion. It’s a book people pick up before boarding a flight, when it’s either that or The Psychopath Test or 12 Rules For Life. It’s pop-psych. Some of you may believe this is the old “clown nose on, clown nose off” evasion used by Jew agents like Jon Stewart or Jimmy Kimmel, but I think it’s all a bit of fun.

Adams is pushing hard for the theory that Trump won because he’s persuasive. Facts don’t matter. Hmmmmmmmm. What would be some alternative filters to explain his win?

• Jared Kushner won the election by using advanced analytics to campaign in all the right places for electoral college votes. Trump disguised this strategy by hiring first Corey Lewandowski, then Clinton-campaign spy Paul Manafort, then Kelly-Ann Conway as official campaign managers but who were really just front men. Thus they took the heat and Kushner could work in secret.
• There are two Donald Trumps. There is “The Donald”, a buffoonish reality TV star with stupid hair who says the dumbest things. There is also Donald J Trump an extremely savvy and experienced real estate magnate who has been outplaying the most apex of predators in the Manhattan jungle for decades. The buffoon is a ploy to cause his opponents to underestimate him. The real Donald J Trump is a revolutionary political leader who has been planning his presidency for decades.
• The Clinton campaign gave orders to their MSM flunkies to promote Donald Trump in the Republican primaries because she thought The Donald was the real man and he’d be easy to beat in the general election. This is the ‘pied piper’ strategy. Adams wants you to believe Trump’s persuasion gave him all that positive coverage and then it was because ‘Godzilla’ (Robert Cialdini) was hired by the Clinton campaign after Trump secured the nomination that suddenly Trump started getting bad coverage. Really, it was always the Clinton plan to build him up for the nomination and then tear him down for the election.
• Trump represented a genuine alternative to the establishment republican candidates and the utterly corrupt Hillary Clinton. Voters aren’t that dumb. Hillary had been demonstrably corrupt for decades and Trump wasn’t taking any large donor contributions. Bernie fans realised Clinton had screwed them by rigging the Democrat nomination and many stayed home. After fifty years of never having a real choice at the ballot box, the US voters finally had one and they chose Trump.
• Trump’s policy positions were genuinely fresh and good for America, such as controlling illegal immigration, resisting political correctness, restoring the military, getting out of harmful global agreements, and scrapping Obamacare. Adams is flat out wrong when he repeats the Clinton lie that Trump was vague on policy. No. He had detailed policy documents on his campaign site from early in the race. Many Americans voted for the policies rather than the man. Facts did matter.
• Demographic changes following the 1965 immigration bill, the Reagan amnesty, and flooding illegal immigrants have meant the Democrat party became the anti-white party, what Steve Sailer called ‘the coalition of the fringes’. This unholy alliance of contradictory identity groups can only be united through anti-white hate. Eventually, white people overcame their terror of being called racists and decided to vote against the people trying to exterminate them.
• Multi-generational trends (be it r/K or Kondratieff Cycles) peaked Left with Obama who then gutted the Democrat Party with his own managerial incompetence, leaving it extremely vulnerable to a decent Republican campaign. This combined with a mass societal shift towards the Right that was larger than any man or campaign, as can be seen in rising nationalism in Europe. Trump rode that wave.

Personally, I think the Sun Tzu Filter is far more accurate than the Persuasion Filter. But I understand why Adams doesn’t use it. It would mean addressing issues such as Democrat treachery, globalism, the Jewish Question, and taking a stand on policy issues. If he did that, Adams would lose his strategic ambiguity and with it half his audience. He has to pussyfoot around the middle-ground pretending only persuasion matters.

Adams wants to be mainstream. You can’t be that and tell the truth about what’s important. I don’t blame him. We don’t live in an ideal world.

People who lack an education in history and the classics are easily fooled by charlatans. This is why every single year, without fail, there are con-men like Deepak Wayne, or JMULV, or Eben Pagan, or whoever. They tell an exciting new story [3] and the morons jump aboard the hype train. The same thing happens in the social sciences and with public intellectuals. Sometimes they are embarrassing frauds like Tai Nehisi Coates, or Paul Krugman, or Jordan Peterson. Other times they are more like Scott Adams: not frauds, but very clearly men with an agenda for self-promotion who push inconsistent and incoherent philosophies wrapped around some genuinely fresh and penetrating insight.

I like Scott Adams and I absolutely recommend both this book and his earlier (and better) How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. The fact he provoked so much thought from me is evidence of his value as a thinker. But I think he’s completely wrong and you should be very careful letting such a smooth operator have a direct route into your worldview.

If you think I’m just jealous because he’s way more popular than me and predicted the Trump win, I may remind you that I won $6,000 betting on the God Emperor and parlayed my support to get laid with lots of hot girls by running my Trump Stack routine on dates before the election. You can read how I masterfully persuade girls by checking out Daygame Infinite and Daygame Mastery. That’s persuasion honed at the coal face of street pickup.

[1] Often so bold as to explain the technique he’s using, as he’s using it on you. I do rather respect that.
[2] Of course, I’m quite aware that I write books entirely about myself and then fill them with photos of myself. So don’t think I’m criticizing Adams for it and I don’t begrudge him the victory lap because he put himself on the line when there was a lot to lose. I’m just pointing out what the book really is about, underneath his smoke and mirrors.
[3] The reason they rise to prominence is because they have a good story. Every bubble and every scam has a good story. If they don’t, they don’t catch on and you don’t hear about them.