Episode 104: Does Voter’s Remorse Lie Ahead?
William Walton: 00:08 Welcome to the Bill Walton Show. I'm here today with Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the Media Research Center, the largest media watchdog organization in America, with 650,000 members nationwide and over 12 million fans on Facebook. What I want to talk to with Brent about is MRC's latest research report, The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020. In the interest of full disclosure, which you don't always get from the mainstream media, maybe never, I'm also a member of Brent's Board of Directors. Brent, how many people knew what they were voting for when they voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?
Brent Bozell: 00:50 Bill, let me try to answer to you this way. I think there was a wide spread belief, I know I believed this, that with this past election cycle, if this was a referendum on Donald Trump, which is what team Biden wanted it to be, that he'd lose. That Trump would lose. If this was a referendum on the issues, which team Trump wanted it to be, then Biden would lose. At the end of the day, how many Biden voters knew what they were doing? About 94%. If you look at it on an issue-by-issue basis, if you look at it quantitatively, we'll get into this, it's about 83% knew what they were voting and were happy for it. Had they known about the issues, Donald Trump would have won in a landslide and we've proved it.
William Walton: 01:51 You've done a lot of work on this. We all had this hunch, suspicion, knowing how things work. But, you dug in, and you worked with the polling company and surveyed Biden voters and asked them what?
Brent Bozell: 02:07 Well, this is something where we proved cause and effect. We proved throughout the campaign how the media weren't covering issue, after issue, after issue. Things like the Arab Israeli Peace Agreements, like the explosive economy, like the Tara Reade sexual assault allegations. On eight different fronts, we had documented during the campaign how the media weren't covering it. Well, that's all well and good, but what's the effect of all that? And, that's what we wanted to find out in the polling that we did. On election night, we did one poll with John McLaughlin, who is one of the most respected pollsters in America. And then, after the election, we did a second poll with The Polling Company, which is Kellyanne Conway's O company. Again, highly, highly respected.
What we found in both of these polls, and here's what's important, just if you want to be wonky on numbers. But, it's important to understand this. It was 1,750 people in just six states, concentration in six states. It had a margin of error of 2.43%, which is about as statistically pure as you can be. And, it wasn't O registered voters, which doesn't mean anything. And it wasn't even likely voters, which is the definition that people like to use. It was of people who had actually voted. So, you're talking, not in a hypothetical, you're talking to people who actually voted. You're presenting the issues. You're asking them, did you know about it? And then, when they said they didn't know about it, you ask them if it would have changed their votes, and the numbers are there.
William Walton: 04:08 This is state by state. You picked the swing states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Were the results fairly consistent across all the states?
Brent Bozell: 04:20 Well, it wasn't North Carolina. It was Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. These were the most highly hotly contested states in the country. And that's why we focused on those six to see. I can go through some of the numbers.
William Walton: 04:41 Yeah. Let's do that. It's interesting, and it's also interesting issue by issue.
Brent Bozell: 04:46 Okay. Let's look at issue number one. We asked Biden voters, did they know that Kamala Harris was the most left wing Senator in America with a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders? 25.3% of Biden voters didn't know that. We asked them, what that have changed your vote on it? 4.1% said they wouldn't have voted for Biden had they known. Now, this doesn't mean they would have voted for Trump. They might've chosen not to vote at all. They might've chosen to vote for a third party candidate. They might've chosen not to vote on the presidential, but to vote on the Senate. All it says is that they said they would not have voted for Biden.
Second issue. And then, just think about the importance of the issues I'm going to give you. And I challenge anyone to tell me that these were not important issues. We asked them, did they know about the Arab Israeli peace agreements? Now, you're talking about three peace agreements, which has never been done, for which Donald Trump has been nominated for three Nobel Peace Prizes. We asked them, did they know about this? 43.5%, 43.5% of Biden voters didn't know it.
William Walton: 06:07 Well, none of the major networks reported on any of the three nominations.
Brent Bozell: 06:12 Right, and we had done studies on that. That's why it's cause and effect. We had done studies proving how they hadn't covered it. This is the effect of it, because Biden voters are the people who watch CBS news. We asked them, would that have affected your vote? Exactly 5% said they wouldn't have voted for Joe Biden. 95% didn't care. So, we're being very, very accurate here.
William Walton: 06:38 But, with your vote, you're not really saying they would have voted for Trump, you're just saying they would not have voted for Biden.
Brent Bozell: 06:45 We just simply subtract the numbers from Biden.
William Walton: 06:45 Yeah.
Brent Bozell: 06:48 You don't add them to Trump. You subtract them from Biden, and you leave it there. We didn't go, Bill, we didn't go one iota past scientific evidence. We didn't extrapolate and put these numbers across the country. We just surveyed these six states. We didn't extrapolate as to where their vote might've gone. It is only that they said they wouldn't have voted for Biden. So, we just subtracted the numbers.
Third one. We asked, with all this debate. Now, people say that what Trump was beaten by, to a great degree, was COVID, was that whole problem. We asked Biden voters, did they know that the administration had spent $10 billion on treatment programs? Amazingly, 36.1% of Biden voters didn't know that. 5.3% of them would not have voted for Joe Biden. I'm going somewhere with all this.
We asked them, did they know that 11 million jobs were created between May and September. This is a number unheard of in economics, in history. 39.4%, almost 40% of Biden voters didn't know this. 5.4% would not have voted for Joe Biden had they known.
Try this number on for size. We asked them how many knew that the GP had grown by 33.1% in the last quarter. Believe it or not, 49% of Biden voters didn't know this. We asked them, had you known this, would you have voted for Biden? 5.6% said no.
Finally, the first six, we asked them, do you know that America is now energy independent? 50.5%, over one out of every two Biden voters didn't know this. And this is a huge development in energy. We're energy independent, yet over 50% of Biden voters didn't know this. We asked them, had you known this, would you have voted for Joe Biden? 5.8% said they would not have.
Now, why do these numbers matter? Because then we took, on those first six issues, we took that percentage that said they wouldn't have voted, and we applied it to those six states, and we saw that Donald Trump would have won Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He would have had 295 electoral votes. He would have won the election.
Then we asked question number seven. Were they familiar with the allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden? We didn't ask them if they believed it. We just asked them, did you know about it?
William Walton: 09:47 Yeah, this is the Tara Reade?
Brent Bozell: 09:49 Yeah.
William Walton: 09:50 Yeah.
Brent Bozell: 09:51 And again, bending over backwards to be accurate on this. I repeat, we didn't ask them if they believed it, just did you know it. 35.4% of Biden voters had never heard this before. We asked them, had you known about this, would you have voted for Joe Biden? 8.9% of Biden voters would not have voted for Joe Biden, had they known it. Just let that one sink in.
Finally, we asked them, did they know about Hunter Biden's financial dealings, i.e. the laptop? Now Bill, this allegation in the laptop, I will argue is the greatest accusation of corruption in the history of this country. And by that I mean, you've got a laptop that has been proven to have belonged to a Hunter Biden, which Hunter Biden has never denied, and Joe Biden has never denied, and team Trump has never denied was Hunter Biden's laptop. In that laptop are the records showing so many things. One of them being a business deal with a company in communist China, owned by the government, whereby Hunter Biden would get 20% of the company, and the [inaudible 00:11:24] would hold 10% for quote unquote, "the big guy," which is clearly his father, who was then the sitting Vice President of the United States of America, who would get 10%, and it was for access to the White House.
Now, if that isn't corruption, I don't know what the meaning of corruption is. How could that not have been a story? Bill, I'm not suggesting that what it should have been, which is investigated. Look at Watergate. Look how they wouldn't stop investigating Watergate until they got to the very bottom of it. I'm not talking about, I'm just talking about reporting what someone else might've investigated.
William Walton: 12:07 A couple of things I'm thinking about as you say this. One is, the typical voter isn't all that well-informed in any election, and I'm not making allowances here. But then, I think you've also done a lot of work at MRC. We've done a lot of work at MRC that suggests that you've analyzed how much, say for example, the Israeli agreement was reported. You analyzed how much Coronavirus coverage was negative about Trump. You've analyzed how much that the mainstream media talks about Hunter's laptop. Can you put those two things together?
Brent Bozell: 12:46 Sure.
William Walton: 12:49 How do those data sets line up?
Brent Bozell: 12:52 Well, let's look at trying to find some apples and apples here. Let's think about the sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden. We have shown, I don't have exact numbers here, but we've shown them, it's on our website, how the media absolutely buried the Tara Reade story. Even though Tara Reade had, I think it was, three corroborating witnesses, including her mother who'd been told, at the time was told, about what had happened. Now, you can believe if you'd like that Tara Reade made it up, then lied to her mother, lied to her neighbor, and lied to a coworker. And maybe she did. I mean, it's not outside the realm of possibilities. The media refused to cover that.
Now, let's look at another sexual assault story. Do you remember a fellow by the name-
William Walton: 13:46 You've got the data that, I think this is important, Brent. You've done so much research. We keep track of the statistics. I don't know how many millions, billions hours of video tape you have in your library that covers every single newscast. You've actually broken this thing down by minutes, or even seconds of coverage.
Brent Bozell: 14:05 Yeah. Yeah. We do. And, we showed how they buried this story. We showed how many stories that were done over a six-month period on Tara Reade. We have charts and graphs, and we proved how it wasn't covered. But, I now ask you to think about another sexual assault story that came out about a guy, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, Brett Kavanaugh. Look what happened with Brett Kavanaugh. There you had a woman, then a girl, who had accused him of sexual assault. The media dropped all programming. They went live all day long. They dragged his family through the mud going after one person after another, after another, after another. Now, Supreme Court Justice, this is serious stuff. But we're talking about presidential candidate, which makes it even more serious stuff. And at the end of the day, Bill, let us not forget that when all the dust settled, there was not one single person on planet Earth that corroborated the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh, not one person. And yet, it was nonstop round-the-clock coverage.
So, how can you say that warranted that coverage, but sexual assault with three corroborating witnesses warranted nothing? You can't make that argument. This is why I will give a million dollars to anyone in the press who can prove to me that I'm wrong about this.
Anyway, let me give you this one last number. On the Hunter Biden financial dealings, simply asked them, did they know about these stories? 45.1% of Biden voters knew nothing about that. Now, you ask them, do you know about Trump? They'll tell you all about Trump. But, did they know about Hunter Biden? 45% didn't know. We asked them, had you known, would you have voted for Joe Biden? 9.4% of Biden voters would not have. Now, why is that number important? Because if you look at the sexual assault in the Hunter Biden story, not only would Trump have won Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, he would have also won Michigan. He would have gotten a total of 311 electoral votes.
And, here are two more kickers. Remember, we only looked at six states. That's 311 just looking at three states. You can assume that these numbers go beyond those six states, but we just looked at those six states.
We then look at the numbers, and you discover that 17%, 17% of Biden voters, people who voted for Biden, said had they known about any one of these, they would not have voted for Joe Biden. 17%. We didn't do this because we wanted to be 100% scientific. We only looked at six states. But, if you use common sense, and you accept that, that 17% is not limited to six states, if you wanted to play a game and make that 17% across the board, across the country, Donald Trump would have won in an absolute landslide.
So, I go back to the-
William Walton: 17:38 I think it changes the electoral college to, what, Trump gets 311 and Biden gets to 227, if you take the results in those seven states, yeah.
Brent Bozell: 17:47 Just looking at those States.
William Walton: 17:47 Yeah.
Brent Bozell: 17:48 But, if you'd extrapolated it to the rest of the country, look what at would've happened. So, I go back to the very beginning. What I said was, the Biden campaign wanted us to be a referendum on Trump. The Trump campaign wanted this to be a referendum on the issues. The media did the bidding of Joe Biden.
William Walton: 18:09 They won, we lost.
Brent Bozell: 18:10 Yeah.
William Walton: 18:11 So, this is the first time we've put the numbers together as to how the swing specific votes. The first time I've seen a study on that, looking at it this way.
Brent Bozell: 18:18 Yeah. We did it. It cost a small fortune of money. I hope you, as a Board member, approve of it. But, no it-
William Walton: 18:27 I approve of this money. This is money well spent. So, what do we do now? Let's assume the lawsuits and the recounts don't change the results of this election. The word that comes to mind, two words come to mind, to me is that when voters realize what they actually voted for, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, voter remorse has got to set in, because already they're starting to name people that they like put in cabinet positions, and it's going to radically change the economic landscape. You know, I'm a finance guy, private equity guy, and if you look at the reversal of the policies on energy and the regulatory landscape, that's catastrophic. I mean, the economy is going to stop growing if they get this stuff in place. And then, what happens?
Brent Bozell: 19:27 Well, let's look at the entirety of the information landscape, because there's another element that we have to throw into the mix as well, which is social media. I think it is fair to say that the 2008, and the 2012, and the 2016 presidential campaigns were decided because of social media, in the sense that Barack Obama won his campaign and his reelection both with because of what he did with Facebook. And Donald Trump won the 2016 election, because of what he did with Twitter. I think 2020, the social media giants played another massive role in the election, but this time going the exact opposite, preventing President Trump from getting his message across.
Let me give you two examples of this, and they are both to me, they're stunning. The first one is the number of times that Donald Trump has been censored, or not just Donald Trump, or his family, or his campaign, during the election that we have tabulated on Twitter alone, and this number continues to grow. So far, we have tabulated 262 times that the President of the United States has said something that Twitter has declared the American people ought not to hear, and prevented him from getting it out. Total number of times that Joe Biden, or his family, or his campaign, had been censored. Ready? Zero. The number 262 to zero on a platform, Twitter, that says it's objective.
Last week, Jack Dorsey was hauled to Capitol Hill and made to answer to some of these questions. When the Hunter Biden laptop story came up, he acknowledged, they censored it, and then Mr. Walton, he called it, quote, "a mistake." How nice, two weeks after the election, he acknowledges that was a mistake on our part, when the damage has been done.
So, now we have to look at this growing censorship, and I think conservatives need to be very, very concerned, because if you can sensor the President of the United States, I can sure as hell censor you. And, Bill Walton can get censored on YouTube, the Media Research Center can be censored on Facebook, and it's starting to happen to everybody. So, this is very, very serious. Bill, how can you have a functioning, everybody's talking about cheating. Okay, that's hugely important. But, how can you have a functioning democracy, if you don't have the ability to have free speech? You can't. You can't.
William Walton: 22:52 Yeah, you're right. And, the shows I've had pulled on YouTube, or at least one of them, COVID 19, I am utterly convinced that years from now when historians do an assessment of what actually happened, that show was 99% accurate about the impact, both social, economic, psychological, and the big price we're paying. And so, we wanted to get the word out for that, and YouTube said we didn't meet community standards. So, you know me, I'm a line of action guy.
So, here we are. What do we do about it? You and I have talked about this arcane thing called Section 230, because we're not going to get control of the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the major networks. The social media companies are becoming ever, ever, ever more important, and so we've got to figure out some way to get them. We've got to level the playing field.
Brent Bozell: 23:48 Yeah. So, just to be very rudimentary about the Section 230. This is a clause in the Commerce Department that says, a regulation that says that tech companies, big tech companies, are exempt from liability for what it is that they do. Because they were able to successfully argue that as opposed to the New York Times as a publisher, they are only platforms and therefore, don't blame us. Blame the person who puts something on our site, which is an extraordinary, extraordinary sleight of hand that they pulled. Well, guess what? We've got members of Congress all over the place that are saying this is nonsense, and we're going to take away that special protection that you have. You are going to be liable for what you do.
William Walton: 24:39 Yeah, well, as you know, as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Decency Act, I think that was the word, the deal was to create a carve out so that these little fledgling social media companies could get the word out without being sued by whatever kind of content was on there. But, it did tell them they could go ahead and block obnoxious content, pornographic content, things like that. The language is not that specific. But then there's this phrase in there, otherwise objectionable.
Brent Bozell: 25:15 Yeah. That's right. Very good.
William Walton: 25:18 They're driving a Mack truck through the otherwise objectionable, where you got Jack Dorsey with his nose ring. I apologize to all of you who may be listening and have a nose ring, but it doesn't look good on him. He gets to decide what's otherwise objectionable, and what he finds objectionable is Brent Bozell's speech, Bill Walton's speech, and Donald Trump's speech.
Brent Bozell: 25:39 Look, there are limits to free speech. Always have been. You can't scream fire in the movie theater. You can't put an F-bomb on your license plate. There are limitations. There ought to be limitations on social media. Limitations that say things like, you can't promote terrorism, things like, you can't promote pedophilia. You look at those illegal activities and they've got to be egregious legal activities. It's amazing that they can let Antifa and Black Lives Matter speak on social media, and advocate violence on social media. Yet, when you had those handful of people, I don't know, Madison, Wisconsin, whatever it was, who were standing on a street corner advocating to keep businesses open, Facebook shut them down because they were committing a crime, because the governor said you couldn't do that. So, this is what they're doing now.
William Walton: 26:45 You lead a coalition on this. What do we call that? The fairness?
Brent Bozell: 26:50 Free Speech Alliance. We have 70 members. Why is this Section 230 thing important? Let's pretend what would happen, imagine what would happen if Facebook, Twitter, et al, were liable for their actions. Go back and think about the Covington kid, that high school kid who was so besmirched, so slandered, so defamed, for seemingly point to a right to life March and being set up, and called every, and dragged through the mud, because he just happened to be there. He sued the Washington Post and apparently got a very handsome settlement, and his lawyers have been licking their chops saying, we're going to keep on going. What would have happened to Facebook had Facebook been liable for what Facebook allowed to go on there? The complete defamation. I tell you, Facebook did far, far more damage than the Washington Post could ever do to that poor kid. It ruined his family.
So, imagine what would have been the legal exposure of Facebook? This is why they're spending tens of millions of dollars, as we speak, on lobbyists, and buying organizations, to get their way to prevent that from happening. So, Section 230 is hugely important. Here's what conservative and you asked, what can be done? I think that the number one most important takeaway from all this is that conservatives must make this the absolute top shelf priority of their existence. And, why do I say that? Because I don't care the wonderful work you do. If nobody knows it, you might as well put yourself out of business.
What is happening now is not a media that are biased and are distorting things. It is a far left that does not want our side hurt. It does not want the public to hear what Bill Walton says. The conversation we're having right now, they don't want the public to hear it. This really is fascistic. This is stuff that Mao Tse Tung would have liked. But, that's what's happening in the news media today.
So, what I say to every public policy group, every political group, is understand this. That, if you don't do something about it, get another job, because your organization becomes irrelevant. It becomes irrelevant. The Media Research Center becomes irrelevant. Bill Walton becomes irrelevant, if we don't stop this.
William Walton: 29:40 So, Section 230, we've got to do something about it. We need to focus our energies on this and get people to understand this is the way we can level the playing field when it comes to speech, and get the word out for what's true, and what we know is good for people, which are our ideas. Brent, thank you.
Brent Bozell: 30:03 Thank you, Bill. Thank you for having me.
William Walton: 30:04 Oh, where can people find the report?
Brent Bozell: 30:07 Go to News Busters, www.newsbusters.org. It's there. Let me just say one last thing if I can. Section 230 is applicable to social media. But, I think that where conventional media are concerned, that the movement needs to understand that, that is no longer going to project its message. That, if the movement wants a storytell, they have to tell it themselves. Everybody has to tell his story himself, and not rely on anyone to do it for you.
William Walton: 30:43 Okay. Well, Brent, thanks for joining, and I'm sure you know I'll be talking about this going forward. So, everyone, thanks for listening. We'd love to hear what you think. Let us know on Parler, Facebook, and Twitter, where you can find the Bill Walton Show. For previous episodes, you can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, and of course, at thebillwaltonshow.com.
Speaker 3: 31:08 Thanks for listening. Want more? Be sure to subscribe at thebillwaltonshow.com, or on iTunes.
