Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1212 Scott Adams： Was Our Election Fair and Free？

00:00:00.000 all right if my technology works which is a big if you're in for a treat you viewers i have a

00:00:09.960 special guest joel pollack who is senior editor at large at breitbart and even more importantly

00:00:17.260 he has a new book out it's tremendous it's called neither free nor fair the 2020 u.s presidential

00:00:23.920 elections hello joel hi so we're getting you fresh you this this book is right uh just published right

00:00:33.120 now right today out today it's an ebook at amazon neither free nor fair and thank you for showing

00:00:42.620 yes you can see it right there on the tablet and i wrote this book in two weeks it's about 180 pages

00:00:52.280 about almost 60 000 words and i had heard of people writing books this quickly before but it

00:00:58.780 had never actually happened to me but once i hit on the idea everything just flowed i was literally

00:01:05.420 writing a chapter a day because all of the pieces fell into place in terms of how this election was

00:01:12.780 run what was wrong with it and how to explain it and really frame it in a way i think that will help

00:01:18.280 people understand perhaps even people who might have liked the result help them understand why we

00:01:22.560 can never really run an election like this again yeah let me say the thing that you're not allowed

00:01:26.880 to say because you're the author which is i've worked with you for a long time now and trump related

00:01:32.300 things and and i've seen the speed at which you write quality material and every time i'm blown away

00:01:38.120 you know i'll get i'll get a message from you it's like i was thinking about writing an article on x

00:01:42.800 and then five minutes later there's a published article on x it's flawless well it's just perfect

00:01:48.020 you're you're you're one of the fastest good writers i've ever seen it's really impressive

00:01:52.620 and by the way one more compliment if you can stand it can you stand one more compliment

00:01:56.640 i love your writing style because you i think you optimize for uh the the quick read on the internet

00:02:05.480 and then when it goes to book form it's so easy to read you don't have all these words to show off

00:02:11.680 hey i know a vocabulary word look at this look at this yeah so so you're you're one of the most

00:02:18.140 approachable writers and let me tell you what i liked about the book um you don't often see the

00:02:26.500 whole picture uh in one place so you can get a sense of the feel we get fed a little bit of the news at a

00:02:34.100 time and you don't realize that it's it that is forming a larger picture but what you did was was

00:02:40.620 fill out that larger picture and added a lot of detail and i i really enjoyed that because it just

00:02:45.720 changes your whole frame of thinking so some specific questions um by the name by the name of

00:02:53.260 the book people are going to think this is going to be about the fraud allegations but it's not

00:02:58.080 um tell me tell me why you de-emphasize that you do cover it but you de-emphasized it right so i

00:03:05.460 have a chapter about the vote and that includes the fraud allegations i also have an appendix where

00:03:10.720 you can go and see all of the major legal cases and where they are and what some of the major fraud

00:03:17.000 allegations are but i only focus on that toward the end because while voting and vote counting are

00:03:24.260 obviously the most important things that happen in an election they're also the last things that

00:03:28.120 happen and if you don't look at the election as a whole you're missing the bigger picture we have to

00:03:34.720 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

00:03:39.320 at this very important clump of trees let's take a wider view and i want to say first what my

00:03:46.080 conclusion is obviously it's in the title neither free nor fair this was an election that was set up

00:03:51.560 in a way that was almost impossible for trump to win and i'm not just saying that after the fact

00:03:56.340 but throughout the election i was writing articles about how certain things were making it very

00:04:01.840 difficult for trump to win or we're making it almost certain people couldn't trust the result

00:04:06.800 and it wasn't just me we had authors writing even last year the year before about some of what dr

00:04:13.740 robert epstein was coming up with and he's not a conservative he's not a trump supporter he's a liberal

00:04:18.920 academic but he was pointing out that the social media companies that big tech they have so much

00:04:24.800 power over the flow of information that they can change an election simply by changing their search

00:04:29.900 algorithms or by reminding people to vote in certain areas and it looks like they did that

00:04:34.260 so people have been warning for quite some time that a lot of things about this election were

00:04:39.440 setting up to be unfair to the president specifically because the people who had the power to make them

00:04:46.180 unfair were telling us quite openly and so to people who are very concerned about voter fraud and

00:04:51.300 dominion voting machines and signature checking i would say that the amount of legal mickey mouse stuff

00:05:02.180 that happened with this election out in the open is probably much more important than the fraud that

00:05:09.680 may or may not have happened in specific places i'm not ruling out that that had an impact but what we

00:05:15.100 saw out in the open and up front was so much more important and people were warning about it beforehand

00:05:19.940 but let me just tell you what inspired me to think about it this way i spent a lot of time in southern

00:05:25.220 africa i actually worked in south africa for four years i studied there for a couple of years

00:05:29.160 and i was there during the time when zimbabwe was collapsing i had been to zimbabwe once

00:05:34.740 very nice country very nice people highly educated people they had a very successful agricultural economy

00:05:42.200 they were doing all right they were sort of a post-liberation success story and then robert mcgabe

00:05:47.100 decided he was going to rig elections basically so he started doing it and he started doing a lot of

00:05:53.980 things in addition to that like suppressing the opposition media throwing his opponents in jail

00:05:58.760 that sort of thing in 2005 there was an election there and there were a bunch of international observers

00:06:04.560 and people went there and said well you know the voting went okay people put their ballots in boxes and

00:06:11.700 the counting happened and there wasn't any violence so this election was okay because the voting was okay

00:06:17.940 and some other organizations especially human rights watch which is on the left they said no no no

00:06:24.880 you can't just look at election day look at all the months leading up to the election look at the suppression

00:06:29.900 of the opposition look at the violence in the streets by the time people came to the polling place

00:06:35.240 they didn't have the freedom to choose another option they knew that there was so much pressure on them

00:06:41.760 their vote would eventually be found out by somebody and they would be punished if they voted for the

00:06:47.020 opposition so if you just focus in on election day or the election mechanism machinery the counting

00:06:54.000 you're missing the bigger picture so i said what's the bigger picture here in the u.s election of 2020

00:06:59.920 2020 and it turns out there's an international set of criteria put out by something called the

00:07:05.860 interparliamentary union we're not part of it because we're not a parliament we have a congress

00:07:09.720 it works differently but basically it's dozens and dozens of democratic countries have come together

00:07:14.860 and formed this set of criteria for free and fair elections and our election violated those and it

00:07:20.800 violated those in some very important ways one of the most important criteria for example is you have to be

00:07:26.660 able to express political opinions without interference well that didn't happen i mean we had all kinds of

00:07:32.380 interference you know you couldn't show up at a trump rally without fearing that you might be attacked by

00:07:39.160 somebody a counter protester antifa something like that you couldn't put up a trump yard sign you

00:07:44.940 couldn't say that you disagreed with black lives matter you might lose your job your business might get

00:07:50.180 tagged with graffiti people were really scared about expressing their opinions and we know from survey data

00:07:56.500 that republicans were much more scared than democrats some of the other criteria you have to have the

00:08:02.380 ability to share information and obtain information but you couldn't do that in this election either

00:08:06.700 because when the hunter laptop hunter biden laptop story came out the social media companies just

00:08:12.780 crushed it and the mainstream media didn't cover it and cnn actually said we want more of this kind of

00:08:18.740 censorship this is great the system worked great axios which is normally very reliable they applauded this

00:08:24.980 they said that the defense systems that we built against stories like these they worked so nobody

00:08:30.400 knows about hunter biden's laptop then after the election jack dorsey at twitter says okay well we

00:08:35.040 made a mistake we shouldn't have done this but the point is during the election you couldn't get

00:08:38.860 crucial information about candidates and so on and on i go through example after example of how

00:08:44.000 we now on the on this election from from those standards one of the most shocking uh examples

00:08:51.460 happened even earlier involving the group called sleeping giants and what they did to breitbart and i'd

00:08:59.220 kind of sort of had a vague understanding of that story but when you actually see it told you know all

00:09:05.680 the parts put together and it just blew my head off tell quickly tell the story of sleeping giants and how

00:09:12.780 they took breitbart off the field basically well the the happy ending is they didn't really take us off the

00:09:19.480 field in the sense because we developed ways to work around them but the sad part is for a lot of

00:09:25.040 other media organizations sleeping giants really hurt them inadvertently i'll tell you how that happened

00:09:30.560 it's it's kind of tragic but funny at the same time so so tell us tell us who they are and what they did

00:09:35.820 so sleeping giants was a group of people on the left who decided that breitbart was the problem that we

00:09:42.240 were the reason trump had won the election and this came out of various news articles at the time in

00:09:48.560 november in the mainstream media and people on the left trying to figure out how trump won this

00:09:53.820 election they didn't anticipate it the polls told them he couldn't how did he do it and they said

00:09:57.740 well breitbart news is the problem because we have a very active social media following and when we put

00:10:03.760 out an article it gets shared by millions of people so we must be the problem therefore let's try to

00:10:08.640 destroy breitbart by boycotting their advertisers now most of our advertisers just come to us through google

00:10:15.320 ads we don't have a lot of separate advertising arrangements so what they did was they would take

00:10:21.460 a screenshot of some headline that they knew would be objectionable at breitbart you know milo yiannopoulos

00:10:26.800 used to write at breitbart so they would take one of his old columns which were intentionally provocative

00:10:30.560 and then they'd make sure that it appeared next to a brand on breitbart's website and you can do this

00:10:36.640 because if you if you search enough terms in google google ads will send you things related to those

00:10:41.720 search terms you know if i look up a las vegas hotel for the next week or two weeks i get las

00:10:46.820 vegas hotel advertisements and all the web pages i i visit even if i've already booked a hotel you know

00:10:51.580 back in the days when people used to travel so uh so they used to game it that way where they would

00:10:56.300 set up an ad and an objectionable screen grab from breitbart and then they would send it to the company

00:11:02.140 saying hey do you know your ads are running next to this hateful headline and they would teach the

00:11:07.940 companies how to take their particular ad out of the google rotation on breitbart so they did this in

00:11:15.720 many many uh instances i think they they claim thousands of advertisers or whatever and they were

00:11:23.140 covered extensively by the media the new york times actually put out an op-ed explaining to people how

00:11:28.520 to do this how to boycott breitbart news this is new york new york times explaining how to destroy a

00:11:33.940 competitor basically and every time these guys were interviewed in the media the media protected

00:11:39.760 their anonymity so they were hiding behind this twitter account sleeping giants and you know a

00:11:44.380 journalist is supposed to find out who people are you protect sources in some cases but here they were

00:11:50.240 just trying to protect these individuals from any kind of scrutiny eventually the daily caller did some

00:11:56.340 detective work they figured out who these people were and they turned out to be two ad executives

00:12:01.080 and nothing happened to them i mean they didn't suffer any you know real consequences or anything

00:12:05.740 they had no reason to be anonymous they were celebrated in fact they went on cnn and they did

00:12:09.440 a whole media tour now but was this uh related to or completely separate from the fact that google just

00:12:16.260 took you off the search algorithm yeah it was it was separate but related in the sense that

00:12:22.160 google took us off the search algorithm slowly over time and then finally this past may there was a major

00:12:29.940 algorithm update where we just disappeared entirely from google if you search google you can't find

00:12:36.400 breitbart search results unless you search with the word breitbart and part of the headline and even then

00:12:42.100 you don't get it if you search for an article i wrote today on google you'll get all of the sort of

00:12:47.580 spam websites that steal our content but you won't get our website and if you google me apparently i don't

00:12:55.460 come up until page seven of the search results on google associated with breitbart but if you go on

00:13:00.380 bing.com and do the same search it's like the first thing that comes up so google's obviously trying to

00:13:05.120 trying to stop us yeah is this the first time in history that the media was powerful enough to just

00:13:12.740 make major stories and in fact entire entities disappear because has that been something that always

00:13:20.040 happened that we just didn't notice or is it a new capability it's a new capability because it's

00:13:27.000 universal i'm sure there are times in the past where in the late 19th century let's say the era of yellow

00:13:33.000 journalism where you had specific publications that took very partisan lines i'm sure they made news they

00:13:39.080 didn't like disappear but you could just go and buy another newspaper and get a totally different

00:13:43.540 perspective that's not new what is new is that google controls 90 of the search traffic

00:13:48.880 and you know if you want to be in in the in the debate you've got to be on twitter so these

00:13:53.320 social media giants basically control the media uh they're basically the editors for the mainstream

00:13:59.180 media they decide what content is and so they have an unprecedented amount of control so they can

00:14:03.860 really make something disappear almost everywhere so if you were to rank on a scale of one to ten

00:14:10.420 all of the things that influence this election in ways not intended by the framers

00:14:15.940 uh ten is the worst would you say that the social media manipulation would be the the highest on the

00:14:23.600 scale uh compared to even fraud at this point the fraud allegations yeah i i would because the

00:14:31.640 primary way especially when we're all sitting at home right i mean the pandemic definitely exacerbated

00:14:36.300 some of these things but the primary way we're getting information is through these big tech giants and

00:14:41.540 they play an enormous role in the kind of information people receive people imagine that things happened

00:14:49.160 because they're told they did but perhaps they didn't likewise people don't know things that

00:14:54.120 happened that are very important that are just edited out of the picture um so you know the the story of

00:14:59.680 the hunter biden laptop is a great example i mean facebook said immediately they were going to suppress

00:15:04.520 the story they said it outright they're one of their spokespeople said in an announcement we're going to

00:15:08.700 suppress traffic to this story until it goes through our fact checking now i don't know i don't know if

00:15:13.560 they ever came up with a result from their fact checking but you know it just never got reported

00:15:18.980 people just didn't see it but but since when is that a standard do they just make up a standard for that one

00:15:24.220 story because half of the news is speculation and that's the important part right so the atlantic did a

00:15:30.920 story on labor day weekend that president trump had called soldiers at this one cemetery uh suckers and 0.76

00:15:37.720 losers and it had four anonymous sources and everybody who was with him that day said it didn't happen 0.96

00:15:42.240 and so forth but that story made it around the world and i think you pointed out at the time it was a

00:15:47.760 very effective hoax because it would go right at the military voters that trump needed to bring to the

00:15:53.720 polls and even if it just shaved off two or three percent i mean look at georgia georgia i think has one of the

00:15:59.200 highest percentages of military veterans living in the state you know look how much trump seems to have lost

00:16:05.820 georgia by it's a razor thin margin and maybe there are enough people who believe that atlantic story

00:16:10.160 you know i have to i have to say of all the things that people talk about and they say oh that will

00:16:15.860 cost you votes and hillary's email costs votes i'd never hear anybody say they made a decision based

00:16:21.860 on any of those things you know maybe subconsciously but when it came to the military thing i did hear

00:16:27.140 anecdotes of people who said screw that guy i'm out yeah and i think that changed votes yeah

00:16:35.220 so so some of the other forces let's let's get a sizing on them so there was there was the threat

00:16:41.800 of violence which suppressed you know ability to to maybe even vote who for who you wanted to maybe

00:16:48.460 you thought it would come back to you um where would you put that on the on the one to ten list

00:16:53.520 i mean i would say it's way less than the social media influence well i think it's less than the social

00:17:00.340 media influence for a particular reason which is that the violence also produced a backlash so one

00:17:07.220 of the things i talk about in the book is that the election was quote unquote rigged legally that is to

00:17:13.900 say the things that happened that made it unfree and unfair were mostly legal the exception is the

00:17:19.280 violence the violence was illegal it was unlawful obviously uh attacking police attacking courthouses

00:17:25.280 attacking individuals attacking homes i mean that's all illegal well there was also a voter backlash

00:17:31.120 at least democrats have said that they suffered a backlash particularly in places like florida where

00:17:38.460 hispanic voters moved really far over toward trump biden still won a small majority of hispanic voters in

00:17:45.840 florida but much less than he needed to win the state so trump won the state and democrats said it was all

00:17:51.620 that defund the police stuff that really killed us that the lawlessness really turned hispanic voters 1.00

00:17:58.020 against democrats in some important communities so i think it's very important i mean to me that felt

00:18:04.160 personally the most important i felt most affected by the the threats of violence uh you know looking at what

00:18:11.120 happened to just my community here i mean the stores boarded up and and people you know lining up outside gun

00:18:17.540 stores uh you know just to make sure they could protect themselves at the same time you've got the

00:18:21.700 leftists in the streets basically saying defund the police then the mayor comes out and says yes okay

00:18:26.060 we'll defund the police we're cutting 150 million dollars i mean that's scary so let me relate it to

00:18:32.040 that let me let me uh bring up the one thing that you and i might have a slight opinion disagreement

00:18:37.640 okay on this um which is you know the extent of uh let's say shy voters for example what what's your

00:18:48.300 opinion on whether or not those shy voters existed and specifically the question of why is it that trump

00:18:54.960 weirdly did uh much better than expected with the groups that he should have been most demonized by

00:19:01.720 the example you gave plus uh black voters increased but then suspiciously he seemed to have not uh did

00:19:09.900 he actually lose or just he didn't gain among his core you know white working class people well isn't

00:19:16.180 it suspicious that his core who should have been the happiest because he delivered the most based on what

00:19:23.460 he promised he would deliver them you would expect that you'd get you know at least a few more of them

00:19:28.680 because they'd say yeah you know i i was almost there last time but yeah he delivered for the

00:19:33.800 group he said he would deliver and i'm in that group does that feel i i know you're uh i i'm going

00:19:40.960 to compliment you again the the unbiased way that you approached the allegations of fraud given that

00:19:47.440 you're associated with breitbart was actually impressive the amount of restraint you had of just

00:19:53.080 sticking to what is known versus what is not known but i look at this and i think

00:19:58.320 that is one of the strangest outcomes that his core base was the thing that didn't improve

00:20:04.960 and everything else did but but you looked at that and kind of said uh oh and you also said that the

00:20:12.160 uh the fact that uh there was difference between the down ballot result which republicans did well

00:20:18.700 versus trump at the top didn't do well would be would suggest that it's a a valid vote or

00:20:26.180 suggests a lack of fraud as the explanation but i would say maybe it doesn't say that

00:20:32.080 i don't think it says anything i don't rule it out i just i just think that there are

00:20:37.460 explanations for some of the anomalies that that fit a non-fraud universe so i'm not saying there

00:20:45.280 wasn't fraud in fact i think the conditions were created where fraud would be a lot easier to commit

00:20:50.260 and this is where i come in with a story of mark elias i mean this to me is the most outrageous

00:20:55.380 thing about the whole election that this guy mark elias who was hillary clinton's lawyer in 2016

00:21:00.500 he's the guy who paid fusion gps to create the russian dossier and then he comes back and he sues

00:21:06.200 all these states to lower their standards in 2020 so they can accept all these absentee ballots and

00:21:12.040 signatures you know i gotta tell you that the at the very top of my notes is uh mark elias because

00:21:18.780 when i when i read that you know i i see lots of disconnected things in the news and i'm not so

00:21:24.080 good at connecting them all but when you told me that he was the steel dossier guy and the main

00:21:30.360 character that got the rules changed that probably changed the entire fate of the universe and it's just

00:21:38.040 this guy it's just one this one guy he did both of those things and i'm thinking man i think the world

00:21:44.320 needs to know a little bit more about mark yeah it's interesting because you think there'd be some

00:21:49.160 kind of law against that or he'd be his barred or whatever but here's the even funnier thing i mean

00:21:54.680 this is sort of a postscript to the whole story there's a congressional race in iowa where the

00:22:00.680 republican is leading by six votes it's one of the closest races in history she won by six votes

00:22:06.640 mark elias is representing the democrat in that election trying to overturn the result so he's out

00:22:12.820 there on social media with democrats and journalists saying hey donald trump's trying to overturn the

00:22:17.060 result of the election he's going to court mark elias isn't just going to court in this congressional

00:22:21.780 district in iowa he's actually planning to ask nancy pelosi to convene this special committee in the

00:22:28.060 house which can decide these close elections and have the house of representatives declare that the

00:22:33.600 democrat actually won the race even though the republican has six more votes so i mean this guy will find

00:22:39.060 any way to try to win he's an interesting character i mean you know in a sense there's honor among thieves

00:22:45.560 you kind of take off your hat and say well you know well done and everything like that but it's really

00:22:49.020 creepy anyway but your question is really about um the fraud you know could there have been fraud

00:22:53.880 um i think there could have been and what's interesting is that the kind of standard republican

00:23:01.180 story about fraud may be wrong in that the the standard story is they found all these votes in

00:23:08.920 big cities in key swing states where there are large minority populations now there is a history

00:23:15.900 and we know this from some of the testimonies there is a history of ballot harvesting and minority

00:23:19.940 communities and that sort of thing the problem for the kind of standard republican explanation is that

00:23:25.200 turnout among black voters was actually down in some of these places in milwaukee for example

00:23:30.300 joe biden got fewer black votes in 2020 than hillary clinton got in 2016 so where was the ballot

00:23:39.580 harvesting where were all these funny new ballots coming from they would have to have been coming from

00:23:43.760 the suburbs not from the city so that would tend to reinforce your point that maybe the shenanigans

00:23:50.900 weren't uh among these groups that trump was supposed to do poorly among maybe the shenanigans were among

00:23:56.240 the white working class voters that were his base but there are other explanations also i mean the

00:24:01.540 breitbart explanation uh or i should say this is an opinion of many people at breitbart is that

00:24:07.080 trump got sidetracked because the most important issues for sort of typical white working class voters

00:24:15.820 were things like trade and immigration and instead trump reached out to these other groups of voters with

00:24:22.300 things like prison reform and while that gained him a lot of votes among minorities maybe it lost

00:24:27.300 him votes among white working class voters who wanted to see more action on the border wall i mean i don't

00:24:32.300 know um but but you know i don't know i haven't talked to anybody who would change a vote because of

00:24:40.120 prison reform no and i think that it probably is a net positive for him i mean you know i think it was a

00:24:46.760 very good issue for him also it makes it easier for some white suburban liberal voters uh who might

00:24:52.000 quietly want to support trump to say well you know he's doing the right thing on these racial issues

00:24:55.800 i can feel comfortable supporting him he's not a racist after all so it's i think it's it's helpful

00:25:00.360 there i i think that for a lot of this is sort of a weird paradox for a lot of white males all right

00:25:07.880 i guess i can say this because i'm one of them there's an incredible amount of pressure in this

00:25:13.120 environment to prove that you're not the problem and i think there's a lot of signaling that goes on

00:25:20.040 whether or not people actually vote this way but it probably at some level affects at least some votes

00:25:23.720 there's a lot of signaling you kind of want to preserve yourself in this new world and the way

00:25:27.740 you do that is by moving to the left the one demographic group trump did worse on in 2020 was

00:25:34.080 was white males he did better with every other group including white females he did better with every

00:25:39.020 other demographic group but he he lost support among white males i think both middle class and

00:25:42.780 working class and i think that's partly because of this pressure i think you know when you look at

00:25:48.800 black lives matter and the cancel culture and all of that it's almost like a vote for self-preservation

00:25:54.120 to say hey you know i actually voted for the other guy i i'm not i'm not the problem yeah you know i've

00:26:00.500 i've made uh the point that you could ignore everything that is uh claimed about fraud and and everything

00:26:08.200 else and just look at whether there was a force keeping people from witnessing the transparency of

00:26:14.840 the the ballot counting so what do you think of that argument that uh as long as you have force

00:26:21.940 keeping people from looking to make sure the ballot is done correctly that you've already lost the

00:26:27.440 republic you haven't just lost the election you've lost the republic because yeah whoever can apply

00:26:34.280 force is the government right and there's another element to that also which is the legitimacy of

00:26:41.020 force so when joe biden said during the campaign that he was recruiting i think 10 000 volunteers

00:26:49.360 to help make sure there was no chicanery that was his word i remember now chicanery you know trump 0.65

00:26:54.680 trump's going to try to steal the election biden actually said that on the daily show trump's going

00:26:58.380 to steal the election so it's not as if republicans are the only ones talking about fraud but anyway

00:27:02.460 biden said in advance we're getting 10 000 volunteers and the media covered it like it was great he's

00:27:09.120 going to stop trump from stealing the election what a great civic duty these people are performing

00:27:13.960 then when trump said i want to go recruit thousands of poll watchers the media reported it as if he were

00:27:20.680 recruiting an army of thugs like um when it was the same exact thing i mean that's people who go and

00:27:29.000 watch i've been a poll watcher so i can let me tell you a little bit about my story as a poll watcher

00:27:33.940 and and my experience with some of this i was a poll watcher in 2008 in portsmouth new hampshire

00:27:39.660 and i was the only republican there and there were five democrats in the same little area very heavily

00:27:45.740 democratic area and i raised an objection at that time because the voters were handing their ballots in

00:27:54.520 face up which meant that the person taking the ballot could see who they voted for and it just

00:27:59.320 so happened that the person taking their ballot was a senior official in the local democratic party

00:28:03.700 so in my mind i thought this creates a possible intimidation do you really want the senior official

00:28:09.680 in the local democratic party to see who you're voting for so i objected and i said hey you got to tell

00:28:14.320 people to turn their ballots over so they're face down and i was told no you don't have to do that

00:28:19.400 don't be ridiculous so i called the hotline or whatever it was and the state attorney general's

00:28:25.900 office called the polling station and says no you really should tell them to turn it face down 0.89

00:28:29.260 so they did they changed in the middle of the day they started putting the ballots in face down but i got

00:28:34.780 dirty looks from everyone else in the room for the rest of the day you know it's hard to be that guy

00:28:40.200 so whether there's actual force or not you know if you're a republican poll watcher in a democratic

00:28:45.680 precinct you want to make sure nobody's cheating or whatever and are you going to be the one to uh 0.52

00:28:50.580 to raise the objection when you're completely outnumbered and let's say you're not a well

00:28:54.800 you know i don't know if you heard my suggestion the other day but my suggestion was that all the uh

00:29:01.420 observers the the ballot counting witnesses should be required to be attorneys so you you have a

00:29:08.920 background in the law and my my thing is that the average person will back down from a fight

00:29:15.280 right but somebody trained as a lawyer the fight is why you're there you know right right you're not

00:29:21.300 going to back down that's what you do so i wouldn't send you know i wouldn't send a poodle into a pitbull 1.00

00:29:28.520 fight you know right so send your pitbulls so right so in a lot of these voting districts there's there

00:29:36.380 there are republicans who are intimidated who are outnumbered and yeah who can be excluded or

00:29:41.260 or feel that they can't raise objections and and um and but again there's an element of the media to

00:29:47.260 this as well because democrat poll watchers are good republican poll watchers are you know proud boy

00:29:54.720 white supremacists i mean that's that's part of what happened in this election was we had such extreme

00:30:00.160 media bias that one entire side of the political argument was delegitimized

00:30:04.540 well all right so for those of uh anybody joining us we're here with uh joel pollack in his new book

00:30:12.680 just came out neither free nor fair talking about all the the various elements that went into making

00:30:17.940 this election less than fair would you be in favor of section 230 the removing of uh protections from the

00:30:28.160 social media companies so they could be sued if they're if they allow somebody to say something

00:30:33.340 bad on their platform right now they can't be sued well let me say i i think that the tech companies

00:30:39.160 have to have some consequences for what for what happened so so i definitely agree that they've abused

00:30:44.820 their power and let me say this about section 230 the first time i ever heard the section 230 argument

00:30:51.440 i thought it was kind of a weak weapon to use against the tech companies and that's because they're so

00:30:59.060 wealthy that suing them for let's say defamation which is one of the main reasons to to have that

00:31:07.500 section 230 protection right if they if they're not responsible for what people publish on their

00:31:12.020 platforms then they can't be sued if people publish false things but if they are responsible

00:31:16.500 they can be sued for defamation but how much does a defamation lawsuit really cost facebook

00:31:22.060 you know it how much is it really going to cost google you know a few hundred million dollars a

00:31:27.200 year i mean that's well it's enough to put all of their potential and future competition and a

00:31:33.600 business so twitter can twitter can pay the legal fees but parlor's gone tomorrow right parlor's gone

00:31:41.000 that's absolutely right so i think that the question is then whether you eliminate section 230 or you

00:31:47.300 just say it's not applicable to these companies anymore because they fall so far outside of it now

00:31:52.780 that they've started policing content one way or another whether it's moving them out of section 230 or

00:31:58.740 using antitrust litigation i mean google's now under this antitrust litigation from the government

00:32:06.020 i know some people at google who are laughing it off they say oh you know we can get out of any of

00:32:09.620 these lawsuits so they're not even taking it seriously but we'll see i mean i i do think that they've

00:32:15.220 abused their power they have a complete monopoly on search engines with google they have a monopoly

00:32:19.840 on public discourse with twitter and they've abused it i mean it's it's kind of incredible because

00:32:25.720 when you look at again the two stories that we want to compare the atlantic story about suckers and

00:32:30.820 losers and the hunter biden laptop story there was no evidence in the atlantic story except for

00:32:36.140 four anonymous sources the hunter biden laptop story had physical evidence i mean it had it had you know

00:32:41.580 a computer plus it had corroborating evidence i mean we were able to corroborate it at right part

00:32:46.220 because hunter biden's old business partners who's now in federal prison gave us his email password and

00:32:52.280 said go into my email account here are all the emails you know independently of this laptop here are

00:32:57.240 all the emails so we were like oh yeah here are the emails these are real emails they're right here

00:33:01.620 hello you know but you know the media wouldn't cover it so uh my preferred way to attack this would be to

00:33:10.400 require that you could turn off their algorithm so basically maybe some kind of a law that says a

00:33:18.120 uh artificial intelligence can't decide what i see right i can decide what i see and i might decide to

00:33:27.300 take your algorithm if it gives me some advantages that i i think are a good trade-off but i don't think

00:33:32.260 the algorithm should decide what a human sees i think a human needs to decide now if a human editor

00:33:38.080 decides what i'm going to see you know then maybe i can look at some other publication if i don't like

00:33:44.080 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

00:33:50.240 banned by um you know at some point you have to start thinking about making constitutional changes

00:33:58.340 to adapt to the fact that ais and and algorithms are a bigger part of our reality i mean they're they're

00:34:05.840 almost entities that need some kind of you know dealing with as if they're perpetrators to a crime

00:34:11.680 right you know the constitutional point is a really important one if the government were doing what

00:34:16.960 facebook and twitter did in this election then we would have no problem seeing it as completely out of

00:34:22.700 bounds censorship control and all of that and and they're more powerful than the government really

00:34:27.480 they they can really shut things down now again some of these algorithms are useful i mean my kids

00:34:32.620 love youtube for example being able to control more or less what your kids see and do on youtube is

00:34:38.840 very useful you know and and you know if they watch a movie about uh puppy dogs i want the algorithm

00:34:45.860 to serve them another movie about puppy dogs you know not not to uh give them something else so

00:34:51.320 algorithms can be useful when you can opt into them but there has to be some kind of adult

00:34:56.460 swim you know where where they're not telling us what we can and can't see and look it also requires

00:35:03.520 us to be intelligent consumers of information and to be able to learn to spot the fake news you know

00:35:08.680 you've done that exceptionally well with so many different stories right and left i mean the the georgia

00:35:14.820 story i talk about the georgia story with the surveillance video uh a little bit but you you picked

00:35:19.980 apart some of the things that might um be wrong in the sort of instant conservative social media

00:35:25.740 interpretation of what happened there i just looked at that video and i said i know nothing about what's

00:35:30.160 happening in this video even after watching it and the reason i could say that was just from my

00:35:34.100 experience because i've been a poll watcher and i just know that a lot of the mistakes that happen

00:35:38.200 are just incompetence they're not even deliberate and some sometimes weird things happen um sometimes

00:35:43.540 they're deliberate but they don't matter let me give you another example of that um there was one

00:35:47.320 election where candidates were going around and giving candy to the poll watchers and and election

00:35:51.560 officials now that looks like a violation because they're campaigning inside the polling places 0.83

00:35:56.420 but when it got kicked up to the attorney general or whoever the law enforcement they said

00:36:02.100 well yeah but they're also just kind of saying thank you they're not saying vote for me they're just kind

00:36:07.460 of giving out candy so yeah it's kind of not so good but you know we're just going to let it fly

00:36:12.980 so well the the concept of reciprocity would would say that it is influencing well of course it is

00:36:20.160 so i'm just saying things like that happen all the time and you know it i don't know how you you get

00:36:27.400 rid of something like that um now there has to be some kind of solution though because this vote by mail

00:36:32.760 thing is going to continue to be a problem i mean what's really crazy about this election was we changed

00:36:38.620 the rules in the middle of the election because one side wanted it and the other side didn't and

00:36:45.060 it still went ahead anyway they vote by mail let me ask you about what give me a prediction because

00:36:51.120 you've got a legal background so you can do this better than i can so they're good they're going to

00:36:55.120 take uh looks looks like ted cruz might argue if it gets to the supreme court the pennsylvania case

00:37:01.320 where the the rules were changed but they weren't changed through a legislative process therefore it

00:37:08.360 wasn't constitutional but yet it was a change that maybe if they had voted they would have voted for

00:37:15.940 it because it was solving a specific problem you know the coronavirus and turnout etc i'm predicting

00:37:23.200 that even though it's a slam dunk in terms of the law like it clearly was unconstitutional

00:37:29.780 unambiguously but i'll bet that the supreme court is still going to let it stand so they don't

00:37:35.400 disenfranchise voters what do you think right so that that's exactly correct the courts are terrified

00:37:41.300 of being accused of disenfranchising voters they really do not want to be seen as having done that

00:37:47.120 and probably the strongest legal case is the one in wisconsin actually you know i've had a chance now

00:37:55.580 to look through all of them the wisconsin authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of people to claim

00:38:01.260 that they were indefinitely confined and so they didn't have to show voter id to apply to vote by

00:38:05.740 mail i think in 2016 something like 9 000 people in wisconsin voted as indefinitely confined and this

00:38:12.920 year it was like like 100 000 now you can argue people were indefinitely confined right right but

00:38:20.220 you know the the law really hadn't been changed yet or whatever whatever exception there was hadn't been

00:38:26.780 expanded here's the interesting thing about pennsylvania this this is this is the tough thing

00:38:31.300 so wait wait you have to finish that point that doesn't sound like a strong case to me

00:38:36.420 it's the kind of strong case we're talking about where because the election officials relaxed the rules

00:38:43.580 what that meant was you could basically apply to vote by mail without showing voter id so for the

00:38:49.860 let's say 80 000 or so people who were legitimate voters who were stuck at home who just took advantage

00:38:56.580 of this new leniency but you know they would have done it the right way anyway if they could get out

00:39:01.520 of their house it's it's still just a suspicion that something went wrong right i don't i don't see how

00:39:07.560 you could possibly win that that's what most of these cases are like they're not actually fraud

00:39:14.160 they're saying you change the rules in a way that makes fraud possible so that that's that's what

00:39:20.040 most of these arguments are the pennsylvania one is interesting and and this this is where i think the

00:39:24.420 sequencing really matters because it tells us what the real problem is so the story i knew until

00:39:29.980 researching for this book is the same one you just told which is that pennsylvania changed some of their

00:39:34.680 voting rules and that may have been unconstitutional it turns out we know more or less how many votes

00:39:42.520 were affected by those changes probably around in the area of 10 000 votes not enough to to change the

00:39:47.840 result in pennsylvania if you threw them all out here's the crazy thing

00:39:51.380 the case in pennsylvania that ted cruz wants to argue is not about something that was changed by the

00:40:01.080 pennsylvania courts and it's not about something that was changed by the pennsylvania democratic elected

00:40:06.520 officials it's not about something that was changed outside the state legislature it's about something that

00:40:13.460 was changed by the state legislature so so the big complaint is that all these changes happened

00:40:18.300 outside the state legislatures the state legislatures are the only ones with the power to do this according

00:40:23.000 to the constitution pennsylvania's state legislature made a mail-in ballot law and they did it before

00:40:30.700 the pandemic they did it last year and that's the crazy thing about this so the case that ted cruz wants

00:40:37.720 to argue is that that law was unconstitutional because the law itself went against pennsylvania's

00:40:44.220 own state constitution which bars mail-in voting and the reason this whole latches thing came in

00:40:49.900 remember where they said you're too late to bring this argument was because pennsylvania's had a couple

00:40:54.120 of elections since that law was passed and nobody put up a fight about it but here here's where it

00:41:00.560 here's where the heart of the matter is and coming back to your original point about supreme court not

00:41:04.580 wanting to throw out votes why would pennsylvania's republican state legislature allow these mail-in

00:41:12.440 ballots before the pandemic and they did the same thing in georgia by the way and didn't they assume

00:41:19.500 there would be more controls on it you know so they didn't think there'd be more controls yes they did

00:41:23.780 they did assume there'd be more controls but why did they even go there in the first place and part of

00:41:28.360 it is convenience you know there are some voters on both sides you just don't want to have to go to the

00:41:31.820 polls but part of it is that democrats have managed to frame the discussion around voting to say that

00:41:38.900 unless you can register every little political impulse as a vote you are guilty of racism it is racist to

00:41:48.040 make it difficult to vote the idea is that the voters who are least motivated or least capable let's say

00:41:55.880 of voting are minorities and that let's say let's say least motivated least motivated well this mark 0.69

00:42:04.580 elias guy this is i mean this guy is amazing right mark elias five years ago argued against mail-in ballots

00:42:10.640 you know now he's arguing for mail-in ballots five years ago he argued against him because he said that

00:42:15.680 black voters have lower levels of educational attainment and would have trouble filling out the 0.98

00:42:20.320 forms that's literally what he said five years ago and now you know he's the big mail-in vote guy so

00:42:26.140 he'll he'll find any argument that works to help democrats he'll use but um there's this idea and

00:42:32.820 somehow both parties subscribe to it which is kind of weird but it's a racist idea basically that

00:42:38.780 black voters are less motivated and less organized that's why democrats don't want voter id they say that it 1.00

00:42:46.500 excludes minority voters that's why republicans do want voter id they think minority voters are more

00:42:51.880 likely to be manipulated and so forth and and we're all kind of looking for this fraud or lack of fraud

00:42:58.180 you know in minority voting communities and i'm not even sure that the evidence backs that up it's like

00:43:03.320 that milwaukee example i mean fewer people voted for biden in the black community in milwaukee the votes

00:43:08.540 that came in for biden were from the suburbs so do we really even understand what the problems are in

00:43:13.980 voting i don't think we really do but nevertheless we have this idea that any kind of restriction or

00:43:20.260 safeguard anything that might cause some friction when you try to vote is inherently racist and so

00:43:26.020 that's true of every every change of anything that affects lots of people right there's there's nothing

00:43:32.300 i can't even think of anything that would have a uniform effect on people it just doesn't work that way

00:43:37.800 no it doesn't i mean and van jones who you know you've often pointed out is one of the most

00:43:43.540 honest people on the left said that he he thought that the even though he was very disappointed in

00:43:49.040 the 2020 election results because he wanted democrats to sweep everything he said one of the positive

00:43:53.520 spinoffs is that republicans might realize that some of the low propensity voters are also their voters

00:43:59.580 that that hispanic voters for example might not be motivated it came out in force for republicans

00:44:05.200 again biden won hispanic voters overall but in some places in the country where crime is a real issue

00:44:11.260 like texas border counties the most heavily latino counties in america went went for trump

00:44:16.940 yeah and and nobody could understand in advance that that would happen but here in california for

00:44:23.000 example trump i think got 12 percent of the hispanic vote in 2016 and he got something like 33 percent

00:44:28.880 in 2020 and part of it is black lives matter and defund the police i mean hispanic voters feel

00:44:34.280 threatened by crime and also it's a school shutdowns and and and the business shutdowns that are keeping

00:44:39.980 people from working but you know there's there's problem there's a problem with vote by mail which

00:44:46.280 is that republicans distrust it and there's got to be some way and you know you've you've suggested it

00:44:52.460 with uh voting encryption technology where you have some kind of identity key there's got to be a way of

00:44:58.000 doing remote voting so that you can get the maximum number of people to vote so there's no problem of

00:45:02.180 access or friction or anything like that but also have maximum security now the problem is i don't know

00:45:08.940 that people actually have an interest in solving this problem i mean we've been talking about fixing

00:45:12.080 the election system for 20 years and usually if a problem persists for 20 years it's because there's

00:45:16.580 somebody with an interest in not fixing it so you know i don't know that we're ever going to get to

00:45:21.120 the bottom of this but i do think we can look again at the broader picture we need to insist on this

00:45:27.620 principle of fairness we can't just go into elections where one side's news is is just completely censored

00:45:34.940 i mean they censored the president of the united states and it's kind of unthinkable but that's

00:45:40.440 what happened and the other thing that happened that was crazy to me and i wrote about this in

00:45:44.380 the middle of the election saying that people on either side no matter how this election turns out

00:45:48.340 they're going to have reason to be upset about it because of the military and the military is supposed

00:45:52.680 to be apolitical but all of a sudden you had all these officers stating what their opinions were

00:45:58.540 most of them were retired officers who were blasting trump but there was this one extraordinary

00:46:03.860 example where the chief of staff the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff mark milley gave a speech

00:46:08.960 in which he apologized for being with trump when he walked across lafayette square you know around

00:46:14.300 the black lives matter protest and there were all this there was all this fake news about how trump

00:46:19.420 cleared out peaceful protests using tear gas i mean that never happened it couldn't have happened

00:46:23.780 trump couldn't have walked across the square right after tear gas had been deployed i mean he wouldn't

00:46:28.020 have been able to walk across just you know if you know if you've been around tear gas

00:46:31.480 um which thankfully i haven't but my wife has you can't just walk across a place where there's just

00:46:36.300 been a lot of tear gas but mark milley walked with him and then he apologized saying that you know the

00:46:42.100 military should avoid the appearance of getting involved in politics well it was a ridiculous apology

00:46:47.420 because it wasn't really a political gesture he was basically just supporting the president in a call

00:46:52.820 for law and order which the military ought to be involved in but he was also admitting to democrats

00:46:57.680 that he had done something political so i wrote now he's got himself in a bind because now he's

00:47:02.660 admitting that either way he did something political he's the head of the military effectively the only

00:47:07.280 guy who's below donald trump and and the military has now intervened in the election i mean whether

00:47:12.060 you're a democrat or republican no matter how this thing turns out you know you have cause for

00:47:16.180 complaint why is the military making political statements on either side and you know we just we lost

00:47:22.500 our bearings in this election and and largely because of fake news but we really lost our bearings

00:47:26.760 yeah it does it does feel like the uh the whole psychological structure that held the company

00:47:32.040 the country together for so many years is is dissolving in lots of different parts all at the

00:47:37.560 same time it's like a massive system failure there wasn't one thing although the fake news i would

00:47:43.240 argue is the thing that broke all the other things yeah yeah so there's that uh but i'm an optimist i think

00:47:50.040 i think we uh build back better yeah exactly i don't mind that slogan because it works for me uh

00:47:59.820 as an optimist whether you're making america great again or building back better i'm all for it but i do

00:48:04.740 think we're we're uniquely good in this country at breaking our own stuff so we can make it better

00:48:11.620 this got broken for us but we're kind of used to fixing stuff we're real good at this so i'm optimistic

00:48:18.460 hey joel why don't we uh kind of uh bring it to a close here and um i'm going to finish reading

00:48:27.680 your book i've i've got most of it done here and like i said it's just a tremendous uh tremendous

00:48:33.920 picture that you don't get to see if you're only seeing a news bit at a time but when you pulled it

00:48:39.020 all together it's it's just uh quite a valuable piece here it's called neither free nor fair the 2020

00:48:45.240 u.s presidential elections and if you want to follow joel on twitter that would be at joel

00:48:52.100 pollack and the pollack part is spelled p-o-l-l-a-k don't you dare put a c in there

00:48:58.680 yeah and uh is there anything you you'd like to close with well just this that i think it will help

00:49:07.840 people who are feeling frustrated when they see these voter fraud cases being dismissed or the

00:49:14.120 media ignoring them i think the book will help by putting it into perspective i in other words i think

00:49:19.500 people are obsessing about dominion voting machines and some of these other problems because they have

00:49:24.660 the sense that something was wrong the voter fraud issue is the way we're talking about what went wrong

00:49:29.900 but really there is a bigger picture thing that went wrong and i think this book will help you name

00:49:34.120 what that bigger picture thing is it was the lack of fairness and the lack of freedom that's really

00:49:38.640 what this was yeah very good that that was exactly the context that was missing from the conversation

00:49:43.720 and and you've added that so thank you for joining us hope the uh hope the viewers watched uh watching

00:49:50.880 enjoyed it as much as i did and i'll i'll talk to you later thank you

00:49:54.940 you

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Real Coffee with Scott Adams - December 08, 2020

Episode 1212 Scott Adams： Was Our Election Fair and Free？

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