Scott Adams’ Theory: Anti-Trump Activists Are Planning ‘Their Next George Floyd Moment’

Author Scott Adams has a theory about the ongoing Los Angeles riots.

The cartoonist and conservative podcaster believes they — and any other planned riots or protests — are part of a “photo op competition.”

Adams uploaded an episode of “Coffee with Scott Adams” to social media platform X Wednesday.

Adams mentioned comments made by podcast host and businessman Patrick Bet-David on Fox News’ “Jesse Waters Primetime,” where the Iranian-born financial guru and author said that these riots were part of a plan.

Adams summed up Bet-David’s view that “Democrats are looking for their next George Floyd moment to frame Trump as a dictator.”

“Now that’s exactly what it is,” Adams affirmed. “I would go further, and say what we’re in is not a protest, but a photo op competition. Once you start thinking of it as a photo op competition, then everything makes sense,” Adams stated.

Coffee With Scott Adams 6/11/25 https://t.co/GobcBuywCv

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 11, 2025

Both Adams’ and Bet-David’s framings make perfect sense if we look back to 2020.

The footage of George Floyd in custody sparked feral rage across the country, coupled with widespread support for leftist organizations like Black Lives Matter.

Then, at the end of his first term, Democrats found a perfect enemy in President Donald Trump and his response to those riots that followed.

Floyd’s death was the perfect excuse for the chaos, murder, and destruction that unfolded.

The left needs another martyr now to amplify their current message about opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“At the moment, Trump is winning because the photo ops are, you know, guy with a Mexican flag on top of a burning car,” Adams said, making reference to a viral photo of a Los Angeles rioter.

“So that’s a photo that’s worked in Trump’s favor,” Adams said.

“It would only take one photo of something that goes the other way before the Democrats could be solidly winning the photo-op competition,” he concluded.

“They just need one law enforcement person to put one knee on somebody’s back. They just need one person to be wounded badly. They need a short video of somebody who didn’t look too dangerous being dragged away.”

If Democrats get that, “The photo op contest will get a lot closer than it is,” Adams said.

The whole question in all of this is why? Why are Democratic leaders letting cities burn as looting, violence, and destruction unfold?

In 1966, two professors at Columbia University — Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — wrote an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”

In 2010, author and commentator Glenn Beck referenced the ideas therein as the Cloward-Piven strategy that effectively sums up our current situation.

“Inspired by the riots in Los Angeles in 1965, they wrote and published their article which outlined the best way to bring the kind of Saul Alinsky-type social change to America,” Beck wrote in his article for Fox News.

“In their estimation, it was to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.

“Cloward and Piven instructed activists that if a crisis did not exist, [they should] promote or manufacture one by exaggerating some unthreatening predicament,” he said.

An “unthreatening predicament” like deportations of illegal immigrants is the one leftist activists and Democratic politicians are currently seizing on.

Adams mentioned on his show that many more “protests” are planned across America in the coming days, citing one source as saying there could be planned unrest in up to 1,500 cities or more.

Thus, it’s clear that the goal is still the same as it was back in Cloward and Piven’s day: Overturn the system and upend capitalism.

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