Episode 1212 Scott Adams: Was Our Election Fair and Free?
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Author Joel Pollak discusses his new book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. (Not about fraud allegations, but rather media influence, rule changes, bullying, and more.)
Neither Free nor Fair, by Joel Pollak
Available on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y335nqza
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All right. If my technology works, which is a big if, you're in for a treat, you viewers.
I have a special guest, Joel Pollack, who is senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.
And even more importantly, he has a new book out.
It's tremendous. It's called Neither Free Nor Fair, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections.
Hello, Joel. Hi.
So we're getting you fresh.
This book is just published right now, right?
Today? It just came out today.
It's an e-book at Amazon, neither free nor fair.
And thank you for showing.
Yes, you can see it right there on the tablet.
And I wrote this book in two weeks.
It's about 180 pages, about almost 60,000 words.
And I had heard of people writing books this quickly before, but it had never actually happened to me.
But once I hit on the idea, everything just flowed.
I was literally writing a chapter a day because all of the pieces fell into place.
In terms of how this election was run, what was wrong with it, and how to explain it and really frame it in a way I think that will help people understand, perhaps even people who might have liked the result, help them understand why we can never really run an election like this again.
Yeah, let me say the thing that you're not allowed to say because you're the author, which is I've worked with you for a long time now in Trump-related things, and I've seen the speed at which you write quality material.
And every time I'm blown away, you know, I'll get a message from you.
It's like, I was thinking about writing an article on X, and then five minutes later, there's a published article on X. It's flawless.
It's just perfect. You're one of the fastest good writers I've ever seen.
It's really impressive. By the way, one more compliment if you can stand it.
Can you stand one more compliment?
Sure. I love your writing style because I think you optimize for the quick read on the internet.
And then when it goes to book form, it's so easy to read.
You don't have all these words to show off.
Hey, I know a vocabulary word.
Look at this. Look at this.
So you're one of the most approachable writers.
And let me tell you what I liked about the book.
You don't often see the whole picture in one place so you can get a sense of the feel.
We get fed a little bit of the news at a time, and you don't realize that it's forming a larger picture.
But what you did was fill out that larger picture and added a lot of detail.
And I really enjoyed that because it just changes your whole frame of thinking.
So, some specific questions.
By the name of the book, people are going to think this is going to be about the fraud allegations, but it's not.
Tell me why you de-emphasized that.
You do cover it, but you de-emphasized it.
Right. So I have a chapter about the vote, and that includes the fraud allegations.
I also have an appendix where you can go and see all of the major legal cases and where they are and what some of the major fraud allegations are.
But I only focus on that toward the end because while voting and vote counting are obviously the most important things that happen in an election, they're also the last things that happen.
And if you don't look at the election as a whole, you're missing the bigger picture.
We have to zoom out a little bit.
So I do that in this book. I kind of say, let's look at the forest and not just at this very important clump of trees.
Let's take a wider view.
And I want to... To say first what my conclusion is, obviously it's in the title, Neither Free Nor Fair.
This was an election that was set up in a way that was almost impossible for Trump to win.
And I'm not just saying that after the fact, but throughout the election, I was writing articles about how certain things were making it very difficult for Trump to win, or were making it almost certain people couldn't trust the result.
And it wasn't just me.
We had authors writing Even last year, the year before, about some of what Dr.
Robert Epstein was coming up with.
And he's not a conservative. He's not a Trump supporter.
He's a liberal academic.
But he was pointing out that the social media companies, that big tech, They have so much power over the flow of information that they can change an election simply by changing their search algorithms or by reminding people to vote in certain areas.
And it looks like they did that. So people have been warning for quite some time that a lot of things about this election were setting up to be I think it's unfair to the president specifically because the people who had the power to make them unfair were telling us quite openly.
And so to people who are very concerned about voter fraud and Dominion voting machines and signature checking, I would say that the amount of legal Mickey Mouse stuff that happened with this election out in the open is probably much more important than the fraud that may or may not have happened in specific places.
I'm not ruling out that that had an impact, but what we saw out in the open and up front was so much more important and people were warning about it beforehand.
But let me just tell you what inspired me to think about it this way.
I spent a lot of time in Southern Africa.
I actually worked in South Africa for four years.
I studied there for a couple of years.
And I was there during the time when Zimbabwe was collapsing.
I had been to Zimbabwe once.
Very nice country.
Very nice people. Highly educated people.
They had a very successful agricultural economy.
They were doing all right. They were sort of a post-liberation success story.
And then Robert Mugabe decided he was going to rig elections, basically.
So he started doing it and he started doing a lot of things in addition to that, like suppressing the opposition media, throwing his opponents in jail, that sort of thing.
In 2005, there was an election there and there were a bunch of international observers.
And people went there and said, well, you know, the voting went okay.
People put their ballots in boxes and the counting happened and there wasn't any violence.
So this election was okay because the voting was okay.
And some other organizations, especially Human Rights Watch, which is on the left, They said, no, no, no, you can't just look at election day.
Look at all the months leading up to the election.
Look at the suppression of the opposition.
Look at the violence in the streets.
By the time people came to the polling place, they didn't have the freedom to choose another option.
They knew that there was so much pressure on them, their vote would eventually be found out by somebody, and they would be punished if they voted for the opposition.
So if you just focus in on election day or the election Mechanism, machinery, accounting, you're missing the bigger picture.
So I said, what's the bigger picture here in the U.S. election of 2020?
And it turns out there's an international set of criteria put out by something called the Interparliamentary Union.
We're not part of it because we're not a parliament.
We have a Congress. It works differently.
But basically, it's dozens and dozens of democratic countries have come together and formed this set of criteria for free and fair elections.
And our election violated those.
And it violated those in some very important ways.
One of the most important criteria, for example, is you have to be able to express political opinions without interference.
Well, that didn't happen. We had all kinds of interference.
You couldn't show up at a Trump rally Without fearing that you might be attacked by somebody, a counter-protester, Antifa, something like that.
You couldn't put up a Trump yard sign.
You couldn't say that you disagreed with Black Lives Matter.
You might lose your job.
Your business might get tagged with graffiti.
People were really scared about expressing their opinions, and we know from survey data that Republicans were much more scared than Democrats.
Some of the other criteria, you have to have the ability to share information and obtain information.
We couldn't do that in this election either, because when the Hunter laptop, Hunter Biden laptop story came out, The social media companies just crushed it, and the mainstream media didn't cover it.
And CNN actually said, we want more of this kind of censorship.
This is great. The system worked great.
Axios, which is normally very reliable, they applauded this.
They said that the defense systems that we built against stories like these It worked.
So nobody knows about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Then after the election, Jack Dorsey at Twitter says, okay, well, we made a mistake.
We shouldn't have done this. But the point is, during the election, you couldn't get crucial information about candidates.
And so on and on.
I go through example after example of how we fell down on this election from those standards.
One of the most shocking examples happened even earlier involving the group called Sleeping Giants and what they did to Breitbart.
And I kind of sort of had a vague understanding of that story, but when you actually see it told, you know, all the parts put together, it just blew my head off.
Quickly tell the story of Sleeping Giants and how they took Breitbart off the field, basically.
Well, the happy ending is they didn't really take us off the field in a sense because we developed ways to work around them.
But the sad part is for a lot of other media organizations, Sleeping Giants really hurt them inadvertently.
I'll tell you how that happened.
It's kind of tragic but funny at the same time.
So tell us who they are and what they did.
So Sleeping Giants was a group of people on the left who decided that Breitbart was the problem, that we were the reason Trump had won the election.
And this came out of various news articles at the time in November The mainstream media and people on the left trying to figure out how Trump won this election.
They didn't anticipate it. The polls told them he couldn't.
How did he do it? And they said, well, Breitbart News is the problem because we have a very active social media following.
And when we put out an article, it gets shared by millions of people.
So we must be the problem.
Therefore, let's try to destroy Breitbart by boycotting their advertisers.
Now, most of our advertisers just come to us through Google Ads.
We don't have a lot of separate advertising arrangements.
So what they did was they would take a screenshot of some headline that they knew would be objectionable at Breitbart.
You know, Milo Yiannopoulos used to write at Breitbart.
So they would take one of his old columns, which were intentionally provocative, and then they'd make sure that it appeared next to a brand on Breitbart's website.
You can do this because if you search enough terms in Google, Google ads will send you things related to those search terms.
If I look up a Las Vegas hotel, for the next week or two weeks, I get Las Vegas hotel advertisements and all the web pages I visit, even if I've already booked a hotel, back in the days when people used to travel.
So they used to game it that way, where they would They would set up an ad and an objectionable screen grab from Breitbart and then they would send it to the company saying, hey, do you know your ads are running next to this hateful headline?
And they would teach the companies how to take their particular ad out of the Google rotation on Breitbart.
So they did this in many, many instances.
I think they claim thousands of advertisers or whatever.
And they were covered extensively by the media.
The New York Times actually put out an op-ed explaining to people how to do this, how to boycott Breitbart News.
New York Times explaining how to destroy a competitor, basically.
And every time these guys were interviewed in the media, the media protected their anonymity.
So they were hiding behind this Twitter account, Sleeping Giants.
And, you know, a journalist is supposed to find out who people are.
You protect sources in some cases, but...
Here they were just trying to protect these individuals from any kind of scrutiny.
Eventually, the Daily Caller did some detective work.
They figured out who these people were and they turned out to be two ad executives and nothing happened to them.
I mean, they didn't suffer any real consequences or anything.
They had no reason to be anonymous.
They were celebrated. In fact, they went on CNN and they did a whole media tour.
Now, but was this related to or completely separate from the fact that Google just took you off the search?
Algorithm. It was it was separate but related in the sense that Google took us off the search algorithm slowly over time and then finally this past May there was a major algorithm update where we just disappeared entirely from Google.
If you search Google you can't find Breitbart search results unless you search with the word Breitbart and part of the headline and even then you don't get it.
If you search for an article I wrote today on Google you'll get all of the sort of Spam websites that steal our content, but you won't get our website.
And if you Google me, apparently I don't come up until page seven of the search results on Google associated with Breitbart.
But if you go on Bing.com and do the same search, it's like the first thing that comes up.
So Google's obviously trying to stop us.
Is this the first time in history that the media was powerful enough to just make major stories and, in fact, entire entities disappear?
Because has that been something that always happened and we just didn't notice?
Or is it a new capability?
It's a new capability because it's universal.
I'm sure there are times in the past where in the late 19th century, let's say, the era of yellow journalism, where you had specific publications that took very partisan lines.
I'm sure they made news they didn't like disappear, but you could just go and buy another newspaper and get a totally different perspective.
That's not new. What is new is that Google controls 90% of the search traffic.
And if you want to be in the debate, you've got to be on Twitter.
So these social media giants basically control the media.
They're basically the editors for the mainstream media.
They decide what content is.
And so they have an unprecedented amount of control.
So they can really make something disappear almost everywhere.
So if you were to rank on a scale of 1 to 10, all of the things that influence this election in ways not intended by the framers, 10 is the worst.
Would you say that the social media manipulation would be the highest on the scale?
Yeah, I would.
Because the primary way, especially when we're all sitting at home, right?
I mean, the pandemic definitely exacerbated some of these things.
But the primary way we're getting information is through these big tech giants.
And they play an enormous role in the kind of information that we're getting.
People imagine that things happened because they're told they did, but perhaps they didn't.
Likewise, people don't know things that happened that are very important that are just edited out of the picture.
So, you know, the story of the Hunter Biden laptop is a great example.
I mean, Facebook said immediately they were going to suppress the story.
They said it outright. One of their spokespeople said in an announcement, we're going to suppress traffic to this story until it goes through our fact checking.
I don't know if they ever came up with a result from their fact checking, but it just never got reported.
People just didn't see it. But since when is that a standard?
Did they just make up a standard for that one story?
Because half of the news is speculation.
That's the important part, right?
So the Atlantic did a story on Labor Day weekend that President Trump had called soldiers at this one cemetery, suckers and losers.
And it had four anonymous sources and everybody who was with him that day said it didn't happen and so forth.
But that story made it around the world.
I think you pointed out at the time it was a very effective hoax because it would go right at the military voters that Trump needed to bring to the polls, and even if it just shaved off two or three percent.
I mean, look at Georgia. Georgia, I think, has one of the highest percentages of military veterans living in the state.
You know, look how much Trump seems to have lost Georgia by.
It's a razor-thin margin, and maybe there are enough people who believe that Atlantic story.
You know, I have to say, of all the things that people talk about and they say, oh, that will cost you votes and Hillary's email costs votes, I never hear anybody say they made a decision based on any of those things, you know, maybe subconsciously.
But when it came to the military thing, I did hear anecdotes of people who said, screw that guy, I'm out.
Yeah. I think that changed votes, yeah.
So some of the other forces, let's get a sizing on them.
So there was the threat of violence, which suppressed the ability to maybe even vote for who you wanted to.
Maybe you thought it would come back to you.
Where would you put that on the 1 to 10 list?
I mean, I would say it's way less than the social media influence.
Well, I think it's less than the social media influence for a particular reason, which is that the violence also produced a backlash.
So one of the things I talk about in the book is that The election was, quote unquote, rigged legally.
That is to say, the things that happened that made it unfree and unfair were mostly legal.
The exception is the violence.
The violence was illegal. It was unlawful, obviously.
Attacking police, attacking courthouses, attacking individuals, attacking homes.
I mean, that's all illegal. Well, there was also a voter backlash.
At least Democrats have said that they suffered a backlash, particularly in places like Florida, where Hispanic voters moved.
Really far over toward Trump.
Biden still won a small majority of Hispanic voters in Florida, but much less than he needed to win the state.
So Trump won the state and Democrats said it was all that defund the police stuff that really killed us.
That the lawlessness really turned Hispanic voters against Democrats in some important communities.
So I think it's very important.
I mean, to me, that felt personally the most important.
I felt most affected By the threats of violence, you know, looking at what happened to just my community here.
I mean, the stores boarded up and people, you know, lining up outside gun stores, you know, just to make sure they could protect themselves.
At the same time, you've got the leftists in the streets basically saying, defund the police.
Then the mayor comes out and says, yes, okay, we'll defund the police.
We're cutting $150 million.
I mean, that's scary. So, related to that, let me bring up the one thing that you and I might have a slight opinion disagreement on this, which is the extent of, let's say, shy voters, for example.
What's your opinion on whether or not those shy voters existed?
And specifically the question of why is it that Trump weirdly did much better than expected with the groups that he should have been most demonized by?
The example you gave plus black voters increased.
But then suspiciously, he seemed to have not...
Did he actually lose or just he didn't gain among his core...
White working class people.
Well, isn't it suspicious that his core, who should have been the happiest because he delivered the most based on what he promised he would deliver them, you would expect that you'd get at least a few more of them because they'd say, yeah, you know, I was almost there last time, but yeah, he delivered for the group he said he would deliver, and I'm in that group.
Does that feel...
I know you're...
I'm going to compliment you again.
The unbiased way that you approached the allegations of fraud, given that you're associated with Breitbart, was actually impressive, the amount of restraint you had of just sticking to what is known versus what is not known.
But I look at this and I think that is one of the strangest outcomes, that his core base was the thing that didn't improve and everything else did.
But you looked at that and kind of said, oh, and you also said that the fact that there was a difference between the down-ballot result, which Republicans did well versus Trump at the top didn't do well, would suggest that it's a valid vote or suggests a lack of fraud as the explanation.
But I would say maybe it doesn't say that.
I don't think it says anything.
I don't rule it out. I just think that there are explanations for some of the anomalies that fit I'm not saying there wasn't fraud.
I got to tell you that at the very top of my notes is Mark Elias.
Because when I read that, you know, I see lots of disconnected things in the news and I'm not so good at connecting them all.
But when you told me that he was the Steele dossier guy and the main character that got the rules changed that probably changed the entire fate of the universe.
And it's just this guy.
It's just this one guy.
He did both of those things.
And I'm thinking, man, I think the world needs to know a little bit more about Mark.
Yeah, it's interesting because you think there'd be some kind of law against that or he'd be disbarred or whatever.
But here's the even funnier thing.
I mean, this is sort of a postscript to the whole story.
There's a congressional race in Iowa where the Republican is leading by six votes.
It's one of the closest races in history.
She won by six votes.
Mark Elias is representing the Democrat in that election, trying to overturn the result.
So he's out there on social media with Democrats and journalists saying, hey, Donald Trump's trying to overturn the result of the election.
He's going to court.
Mark Elias isn't just going to court in this congressional district in Iowa.
He's actually planning to ask Nancy Pelosi to convene this special committee in the House, which can decide these close elections and have the House of Representatives declare that the Democrat actually won the race, even though the Republican has six more votes.
So this guy will find any way to try to win.
He's an interesting character.
In a sense, there's honor among thieves.
You kind of take off your hat and say, well, you know, well done and everything like that.
But it's really creepy. Anyway, but your question is really about the fraud.
Could there have been fraud? I think there could have been.
And what's interesting is that the kind of standard Republican story about fraud may be wrong in that The standard story is they found all these votes in big cities, in key swing states, where there are large minority populations.
Now, there is a history, and we know this from some of the testimonies, there is a history of ballot harvesting in minority communities and that sort of thing.
The problem for the kind of standard Republican explanation is that turnout among Black voters was actually down in some of these places.
In Milwaukee, for example, Joe Biden got fewer black votes in 2020 than Hillary Clinton got in 2016.
So where was the ballot harvesting?
Where were all these funny new ballots coming from?
They would have to have been coming from the suburbs, not from the city.
So that would tend to reinforce your point that maybe Maybe the shenanigans weren't among these groups that Trump was supposed to do poorly among.
Maybe the shenanigans were among the white working class voters that were his base.
But there are other explanations also.
I mean, the Breitbart explanation, or I should say this is an opinion of many people at Breitbart, is that Trump got sidetracked Because the most important issues for sort of typical white working class voters were things like trade and immigration.
And instead, Trump reached out to these other groups of voters with things like prison reform.
And while that gained him a lot of votes among minorities, maybe it lost him votes among white working class voters who wanted to see more action on the border wall.
I mean, I don't know. But, you know, I don't know.
I haven't talked to anybody who would change a vote because of prison reform.
No. And I think that it probably is a net positive for him.
I mean, you know, I think it was a very good issue for him.
Also, it makes it easier for some white suburban liberal voters who might quietly want to support Trump to say, well, you know, he's doing the right thing on these racial issues.
I can feel comfortable supporting him.
He's not a racist after all.
So I think it's helpful there.
I think that for a lot of, this is sort of a weird paradox, for a lot of white males, all right, I guess I can say this because I'm one of them, there's an incredible amount of pressure in this environment to prove that you're not the problem.
And I think there's a lot of signaling that goes on, whether or not people actually vote this way, but it probably at some level affects at least some votes.
There's a lot of signaling. You kind of want to preserve yourself in this new world.
And the way you do that is by moving to the left.
The one demographic group Trump did worse on in 2020 was white males.
He did better with every other group, including white females.
He did better with every other demographic group, but he lost support among white males, I think both middle class and working class.
And I think that's partly because of this pressure.
I think, you know, when you look at Black Lives Matter and the cancel culture and all of that, it's almost like a vote for self-preservation to say, hey, you know, I actually voted for the other guy.
I'm not the problem.
Yeah, you know, I've made the point that you could ignore everything that is claimed about fraud and everything else and just look at whether there was a force keeping people from witnessing the transparency of the ballot counting.
So, what do you think of that argument?
That as long as you have force keeping people from looking to make sure the ballot is done correctly, that you've already lost the republic.
You haven't just lost the election, you've lost the republic.
Because whoever can apply force is the government.
Right. And there's another element to that also, which is the legitimacy of force.
So when Joe Biden said during the campaign that he was recruiting, I think, 10,000 volunteers to help make sure there was no chicanery.
That was his word, I remember now.
Chicanery. You know, Trump's going to try to steal the election.
Biden actually said that on The Daily Show.
Trump's going to steal the election.
So it's not as if Republicans are the only ones talking about fraud.
But anyway, Biden said in advance, we're getting 10,000 volunteers.
And the media covered it like it was great.
He's going to stop Trump from stealing the election.
What a great civic duty these people are performing.
Then when Trump said, I want to go recruit thousands of poll watchers, the media reported it as if he were recruiting an army of thugs.
It was the same exact thing.
I've been a poll watcher.
Let me tell you a little bit about my story as a poll watcher and my experience with some of this.
I was a poll watcher in 2008 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I was the only Republican there.
And there were five Democrats in the same little area, very heavily Democratic area.
And I raised an objection at that time because the voters were handing their ballots in face up, which meant that the person taking the ballot could see who they voted for.
And it just so happened that the person taking their ballot was a senior official in the local Democratic Party.
So in my mind, I thought this creates a possible intimidation.
Do you really want the senior official in the local Democratic Party to see who you're voting for?
So I objected and I said, hey, you got to tell people to turn their ballots over so they're face down.
And I was told, no, you don't have to do that.
Don't be ridiculous. So I called the hotline or whatever it was.
And the state attorney general's office called the polling station and says, no, you really should tell them to turn it face down.
So they did. They changed in the middle of the day.
They started putting the ballots in face down.
But I got dirty looks from everyone else in the room.
For the rest of the day, you know, it's hard to be that guy.
So whether there's actual force or not, you know, if you're a Republican poll watcher in a Democratic precinct, you want to make sure nobody's cheating or whatever.
And are you going to be the one to raise the objection when you're completely outnumbered?
And let's say you're not a...
I don't know if you heard my suggestion the other day, but my suggestion was that all the observers, the ballot counting witnesses, should be required to be attorneys.
So you have a background in the law.
And my thing is that the average person will back down from a fight.
But somebody trained as a lawyer, the fight is why you're there.
You're not going to back down.
That's what you do. So I wouldn't send a poodle into a pit bull fight.
So send your pit bulls.
Right. So in a lot of these voting districts, there are Republicans who are intimidated, who are outnumbered, and yeah, who can be excluded or feel that they can't raise objections.
But again, there's an element of the media to this as well, because Democrat poll watchers are good.
Republican poll watchers are, you know, proud boy white supremacists.
I mean, that's part of what happened in this election was we had such extreme media bias that one entire side of the political argument was delegitimized.
Well, all right.
So for those of anybody joining us, we're here with Joel Pollack and his new book just came out, Neither Free Nor Fair, talking about all the various elements that went into making this election less than fair.
Would you be in favor of Section 230, the removing of...
Protections from the social media companies so they could be sued if they allow somebody to say something bad on their platform.
Right now, they can't be sued.
Well, let me say, I think that the tech companies have to have some consequences for what happened.
So I definitely agree that they've abused their power.
And let me say this about Section 230.
The first time I ever heard the Section 230 argument, I thought it was kind of a weak weapon to use against the tech companies.
And that's because they're so wealthy that suing them for, let's say, defamation, which is one of the main reasons to have that Section 230 protection, right?
If they're not responsible for what people publish on their platforms, then they can't be sued if people publish false things.
But if they are responsible, they can be sued for defamation.
But how much does a defamation lawsuit really cost Facebook?
How much is it really going to cost Google?
A few hundred million dollars a year?
Well, it's enough to put all of their potential and future competition out of business.
So Twitter can pay the legal fees, but Parler's gone tomorrow.
Right. Parler's gone. That's absolutely right.
So I think that the question is then whether you eliminate Section 230 or you just say it's not applicable to these companies anymore because they fall so far outside of it now that they've started policing content.
One way or another, whether it's moving them out of Section 230 or using antitrust I mean, Google's now under this antitrust litigation from the government.
I know some people at Google who are laughing it off.
They say, oh, you know, we can get out of any of these lawsuits.
So they're not even taking it seriously.
But we'll see.
I mean, I do think that they've abused their power.
They have a complete monopoly on search engines with Google.
They have a monopoly on public discourse with Twitter.
And they've abused it. I mean, it's kind of incredible because When you look at, again, the two stories that we want to compare, the Atlantic story about suckers and losers and the Hunter Biden laptop story, there was no evidence in the Atlantic story except for four anonymous sources.
The Hunter Biden laptop story had physical evidence.
It had a computer, plus it had corroborating evidence.
We were able to corroborate it at Breitbart because One of Hunter Biden's old business partners, who's now in federal prison, gave us his email password and said, go into my email account.
Here are all the emails, you know, independently of this laptop, here are all the emails.
So we were like, oh yeah, here are the emails.
These are real emails. They're right here.
Hello. You know, but, you know, the media wouldn't cover it.
So my preferred way to attack this would be to require that you could turn off their algorithm.
So basically, maybe some kind of a law that says artificial intelligence can't decide what I see.
I can decide what I see, and I might decide to take your algorithm if it gives me some advantages that I think are a good trade-off.
But I don't think the algorithm should decide what a human sees.
I think a human needs to decide.
Now, if a human editor Decides what I'm going to see.
You know, then maybe I can look at some other publication if I don't like that one.
But if the AI does it, I just don't know what I didn't see.
That feels like that should just be banned by, you know, at some point you have to start thinking about making constitutional changes To adapt to the fact that AIs and algorithms are a bigger part of our reality.
I mean, they're almost entities that need some kind of dealing with as if they're perpetrators to a crime.
Right. The constitutional point is a really important one.
If the government were doing what Facebook and Twitter did in this election, We would have no problem seeing it as completely out of bounds, censorship, control, and all of that.
And they're more powerful than the government, really.
They can really shut things down.
Now, again, some of these algorithms are useful.
I mean, my kids love YouTube, for example.
Being able to control, more or less, what your kids see and do on YouTube is very useful.
If they watch a movie about puppy dogs, I want the algorithm to serve them another movie about puppy dogs, not to give them something else.
Algorithms can be useful when you can opt into them, but there has to be some kind of adult swim.
Where they're not telling us what we can and can't see.
And look, it also requires us to be intelligent consumers of information and to be able to learn to spot the fake news.
You know, you've done that exceptionally well with so many different stories, right and left.
I mean, the Georgia story, I talk about the Georgia story with the surveillance video a little bit, but you picked apart some of the things that might Be wrong in the sort of instant conservative social media interpretation of what happened there.
I just looked at that video and I said, I know nothing about what's happening in this video even after watching it.
And the reason I could say that was just from my experience, because I've been a poll watcher and I just know that a lot of the mistakes that happen are just incompetence.
They're not even deliberate.
Sometimes weird things happen.
Sometimes they're deliberate, but they don't matter.
Let me give you another example of that.
There was one election where candidates were going around and giving candy to the poll watchers and election officials.
Now, that looks like a violation because they're campaigning inside the polling places.
But when it got kicked up to the attorney general or whoever, the law enforcement, they said, well, yeah, but they're also just kind of saying thank you.
They're not saying vote for me.
They're just kind of giving out candy.
So, yeah, it's kind of not so good, but, you know, we're just going to let it fly.
Well, the concept of reciprocity would say that it is influencing.
Well, of course it is. So I'm just saying things like that happen all the time.
And, you know, I don't know how you get rid of something like that.
Now, there has to be some kind of solution, though, because this vote by mail thing is going to continue to be a problem.
I mean, what's really crazy about this election was we changed the rules in the middle of the election Because one side wanted it, and the other side didn't, and it still went ahead anyway.
They vote by mail. Let me ask you about, give me a prediction, because you've got a legal background, so you can do this better than I can.
So they're going to take, looks like Ted Cruz might argue, if it gets to the Supreme Court, the Pennsylvania case, where the rules were changed, but they weren't changed through a legislative process.
Therefore, it wasn't constitutional.
But yet it was a change that maybe if they had voted, they would have voted for it because it was solving a specific problem, you know, the coronavirus and turnout, etc.
I'm predicting that even though it's a slam dunk in terms of the law, like it clearly was unconstitutional unambiguously, But I'll bet that the Supreme Court is still going to let us stand so they don't disenfranchise voters.
What do you think? Right.
So that's exactly correct.
The courts are terrified of being accused of disenfranchising voters.
They really do not want to be seen as having done that.
And probably the strongest legal case is the one in Wisconsin, actually.
You know, I've had a chance now to look through all of them.
The Wisconsin authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of people to claim that they were indefinitely confined, and so they didn't have to show voter ID to apply to vote by mail.
I think in 2016, something like 9,000 people in Wisconsin voted as indefinitely confined, and this year it was like 100,000.
Now, you can argue people were indefinitely confined, but You know, the law really hadn't been changed yet, or whatever exception there was hadn't been expanded.
Here's the interesting thing about Pennsylvania.
This is the tough thing.
Wait, wait, wait. You have to finish that point.
That doesn't sound like a strong case to me.
It's the kind of strong case we're talking about where because the election officials relaxed the rules, what that meant was you could basically apply to vote by mail without showing voter ID. So for the, let's say, 80,000 or so people who were legitimate voters, who were stuck at home, who just took advantage of this new leniency, but, you know, they would have done it the right way anyway if they could get out of their house.
It's still just a suspicion that something went wrong.
I don't see how you could possibly win that.
That's what most of these cases are like.
They're not actually saying fraud.
They're saying you change the rules in a way that makes fraud possible.
So that's what most of these arguments are.
The Pennsylvania one is interesting, and this is where I think the sequencing really matters because it tells us what the real problem is.
So the story I knew until researching for this book is the same one you just told, which is that Pennsylvania changed some of their voting rules, and that may have been unconstitutional.
It turns out we know more or less how many votes were affected by those changes, probably around in the area of 10,000 votes.
Not enough to change the result in Pennsylvania if you threw them all out.
Here's the crazy thing.
The case in Pennsylvania that Ted Cruz wants to argue is not about something that was changed by the Pennsylvania courts and it's not about something that was changed by the Pennsylvania Democratic elected officials.
It's not about something that was changed Outside the state legislature.
It's about something that was changed by the state legislature.
So the big complaint is that all these changes happened outside the state legislatures.
The state legislatures are the only ones with the power to do this according to the Constitution.
Pennsylvania's state legislature made a mail-in ballot law and they did it before the pandemic.
They did it last year.
And that's the crazy thing about this.
So the case that Ted Cruz wants to argue is that that law was unconstitutional because the law itself went against Pennsylvania's own state constitution, which bars mail-in voting.
And the reason this whole latches thing came in, remember where they said, you're too late to bring this argument, was because Pennsylvania's had a couple of elections since that law was passed and nobody put up a fight about it.
But here's where the heart of the matter is.
And coming back to your original point about the Supreme Court not wanting to throw out votes.
Why would Pennsylvania's Republican state legislature allow these mail-in ballots before the pandemic?
And they did the same thing in Georgia, by the way.
But didn't they assume there would be more controls on it?
They did assume there would be more controls.
Yes, they did. They did assume there would be more controls.
But why did they even go there in the first place?
And part of it is convenience.
You know, there are some voters on both sides who just don't want to have to go to the polls.
But part of it is that Democrats have managed to frame the discussion around voting to say that unless you can register every little political impulse As a vote, you are guilty of racism.
It is racist to make it difficult to vote.
The idea is that the voters who are least motivated or least capable, let's say, of voting are minorities.
Let's say least motivated.
Least motivated. Well, this Mark Elias guy, I mean, this guy is amazing, right?
Mark Elias, five years ago, argued against mail-in ballots.
Now he's arguing for mail-in ballots.
Five years ago, he argued against them because he said that black voters have lower levels of educational attainment and would have trouble filling out the forms.
That's literally what he said five years ago.
And now, you know, he's the big mail-in vote guy.
So he'll find any argument that works to help Democrats he'll use.
But there's this idea, and somehow both parties subscribe to it, which is kind of weird, but it's a racist idea, basically, that Black voters are less motivated and less organized.
That's why Democrats don't want voter ID. They say that it excludes minority voters.
That's why Republicans do want voter ID. They think minority voters are more likely to be manipulated and so forth.
We're all looking for this Fraud or lack of fraud in minority voting communities.
And I'm not even sure that the evidence backs that up.
It's like that Milwaukee example.
I mean, fewer people voted for Biden in the Black community in Milwaukee.
The votes that came in for Biden were from the suburbs.
So do we really even understand what the problems are in voting?
I don't think we really do.
But nevertheless, we have this idea that any kind of restriction or safeguard, anything that might cause some friction when you try to vote, is inherently racist.
That's true of every change of anything that affects lots of people.
I can't even think of anything that would have a uniform effect on people.
It just doesn't work that way.
No, it doesn't.
And Van Jones, who you've often pointed out as one of the most honest people on the left, said that he thought that even though he was very disappointed in the 2020 election results because he wanted Democrats to sweep everything, He said one of the positive spinoffs is that Republicans might realize that some of the low propensity voters are also their voters, that Hispanic voters, for example, might not be motivated.
It came out in force for Republicans.
Again, Biden won Hispanic voters overall, but in some places in the country where crime is a real issue, like Texas border counties, the most heavily Latino counties in America went for Trump.
And nobody could understand in advance that that would happen.
But here in California, for example, Trump, I think, got 12% of the Hispanic vote in 2016, and he got something like 33% in 2020.
And part of it is Black Lives Matter and defund the police.
I mean, Hispanic voters feel threatened by crime.
And also, it's school shutdowns and the business shutdowns that are keeping people from working.
But, you know, there's a problem with vote by mail, which is that Republicans distrust it.
And there's got to be some way, and you've suggested it with voting encryption technology where you have some kind of identity key.
There's got to be a way of doing remote voting so that you can get the maximum number of people to vote.
So there's no problem of access or friction or anything like that, but also have maximum security.
Now, The problem is, I don't know that people actually have an interest in solving this problem.
I mean, we've been talking about fixing the election system for 20 years, and usually if a problem persists for 20 years, it's because there's somebody with an interest in not fixing it.
So, you know, I don't know that we're ever going to get to the bottom of this.
But I do think we can look again at the broader picture.
We need to insist on this principle of fairness.
We can't just go into elections where one side's news is just completely censored.
I mean, they censored the President of the United States.
And it's kind of unthinkable, but that's what happened.
And the other thing that happened that was crazy to me, and I wrote about this in the middle of the election, saying that people on either side, no matter how this election turns out, they're going to have reason to be upset about it because of the military.
And the military is supposed to be apolitical.
But all of a sudden you had all these officers stating what their opinions were.
Most of them were retired officers who were blasting Trump.
But there was this one extraordinary example where the chief of staff, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, gave a speech in which he apologized for being with Trump when he walked across Lafayette Square, you know, around the Black Lives Matter protest.
And there was all this fake news about how Trump cleared out peaceful protests using tear gas.
I mean, that never happened. It couldn't have happened.
Trump couldn't have walked across the square right after tear gas had been deployed.
I mean, he wouldn't have been able to walk across.
If you've been around tear gas, which thankfully I haven't, but my wife has, you can't just walk across a place where there's just been a lot of tear gas.
But Mark Milley walked with him and then he apologized saying that the military should avoid the appearance of getting involved in politics.
Well, it was a ridiculous apology because It wasn't really a political gesture.
He was basically just supporting the president in a call for law and order, which the military ought to be involved in.
But he was also admitting to Democrats that he had done something political.
So I wrote, now he's got himself in a bind because now he's admitting that either way he did something political.
He's the head of the military, effectively, the only guy who's below Donald Trump.
And the military has now intervened in the election.
I mean, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, no matter how this thing turns out, you know, you have cause for complaint.
Why is the military making political statements on either side?
And, you know, we just, we lost our bearings in this election and largely because of fake news, but we really lost our bearings.
Yeah, it does feel like the whole psychological structure that held the country together for so many years is dissolving in lots of different parts all at the same time.
It's like a massive system failure that wasn't one thing.
Although the fake news, I would argue, is the thing that broke all the other things.
Yeah. So there's that.
But I'm an optimist.
I think we build back better.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't mind that slogan because it works for me as an optimist.
Whether you're making America great again or building back better, I'm all for it.
But I do think we're uniquely good in this country at breaking our own stuff so we can make it better.
This got broken for us, but we're kind of used to fixing stuff.
We're real good at this.
So I'm optimistic.
Hey, Joel, why don't we kind of bring it to a close here?
And I'm going to finish reading your book.
I've got most of it done here.
And like I said, it's just a tremendous picture that you don't get to see if you're only seeing a news bit at a time.
When you pulled it all together, it's just quite a valuable piece here.
It's called Neither Free Nor Fair, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections.
And if you want to follow Joel on Twitter, that would be at Joel Pollack.
And the Pollack part is spelled P-O-L-L-A-K. Don't you dare put a C in there.
And is there anything you'd like to close with?
Well, just this, that I think it will help people who are feeling frustrated when they see these voter fraud cases being dismissed or the media ignoring them.
I think the book will help by putting it into perspective.
In other words, I think people are obsessing about Dominion voting machines and some of these other problems because they have the sense that something was wrong.
The voter fraud issue is the way we're talking about what went wrong, but really there is a bigger picture thing that went wrong, and I think this book will help you name what that bigger picture thing is.
It was the lack of fairness and the lack of freedom.
That's really what this was. Yeah, very good.
That was exactly the context that was missing from the conversation, and you've added that.
So thank you for joining us.
I hope the viewers watching enjoyed it as much as I did, and I'll talk to you later.
