Jason Hartman hosts Joel Pollak, senior editor and in-house counsel at Breitbart News. They discuss his latest book: Red November, Will the Country Vote Red for Trump or Red for Socialism? This wide-ranging discussion covers mainstream media, activism, the presidential election, and the state of the economy.
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Jason Hartman 1:00
It’s my pleasure to welcome Joel Pollak to the show. He is senior editor at large and in House Counsel for Breitbart News Network. And he’s author of several best selling books, including his latest read November. Will the country vote red for Trump or red for socialism? Joel, welcome. How are you?
Joel Pollak 1:17
Great. Thanks for having me.
Jason Hartman 1:18
Yeah, it’s good to have you on the show. So everybody’s wondering, this is a pretty crazy year, obviously. Uh, how is the election going to turn out? I mean, it’s tough.
Joel Pollak 1:28
Well, it’s anybody’s race to win. But I do think that Donald Trump is gaining strength as we head into the fall. I think that the Black Lives Matter protests, which became riots in many places, really shocked many Americans, they like to call us to defund the police. They led to calls to rewrite history or do away with the history curriculum in Chicago and Illinois. And the riots in Portland. I mean, you were seeing evidence all across the nation. That The democratic rule is synonymous with a kind of disorder. And in fact, Joe Biden who has tried to style himself for a while as a kind of moderate alternative to Bernie Sanders has spent the last three or four months speaking as if he were Bernie Sanders, and he’s promising things like revolutionary institutional changes, and fundamentally transforming the country. He became a lot more radical after he won or at least secured his party’s nomination. And that’s because the campaign is concerned that they don’t have the support of the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. So rather than pivot to the center, and make it make a pitch to general election voters, Joe Biden has spent the last three months pandering to the far left and has not defended the police has not stood up for law in order. He’s offered very weak, tepid and late statements condemning arson and looting. But in general, he’s in favor Have a kind of upheaval and he is in favor of defending the police. He wouldn’t use the word defend. And they’ve put out a statement saying we don’t agree with this. But essentially they do because they’re calling for redirecting funding away from law enforcement to other priorities that they say will be more effective. That is, essentially what defund the police is all about. So Joe Biden has been settled for the last two months with a kind of social unrest that the Democratic Party has encouraged, and it’s become violent, and Donald Trump has taken the lawn order side of the argument, and I think that is a winning position. In most cases, there’s a long way to go still, but I think that Trump has the better of the arguments.
Jason Hartman 3:41
You know, it’s been said that this is the largest political campaign rally ever these riots.
Joel Pollak 3:48
Right, well, according to the New York Times and Pew Research, and you know, you can trust them, I suppose, as far as you want to. Something like 25 million Americans participated in these protests. No, I don’t think that’s accurate.
Jason Hartman 4:00
But it tells you you do that high or low. You said not
Joel Pollak 4:05
as much too high is much too high. We haven’t even seen one crowd, I think exceeding 1 million people. If you think about how many major cities there are in the United States that have had protests, perhaps people tweeted something or retweeted something, or put a black square on Instagram or something. I mean, I, if they count that as protest, maybe you could get that number. But this is not a massive nationwide protest in the way we see in other countries that are brought down governments, but in the minds of the left and the mainstream media, that’s what it is. And they’re using it to rally their activists to rally the left to rally the base. What they’re also doing is they’re frightening the middle, and the iconic image of the McCloskey in St. Louis defending their home with a pistol and an AR 15 semi automatic rifle while a mob walks across their private property. That’s become for many people. The summary of where we are as a nation where the democrats essentially are leaving the mob up to the door, and they’re saying you can’t call the police. Oh, and by the way, we’re going to take your weapons away. You can’t have that ar 15. In California, it’s already illegal to buy one. And you can’t exercise your second amendment rights, nor can you call the police. And we’re gonna come and take everything you have, because it’s part of our reparations agenda, or it’s part of revolutionary institutional change. That’s a frightening image. And Joe Biden is running on the wrong side of that image. Joe Biden is running on the idea that America is systemically racist, and that we need profound changes. This is not the same Joe Biden people have known for half a century in politics. This is not the handshaking back slapping hair, sniffing, you know, well, maybe he’s still on there.
Jason Hartman 5:55
What’s that child molesting? Oh, he’s such a weirdo. weird guy. No,
Joel Pollak 6:00
this is not the same Joe Biden. In fact, at the start of the campaign, Biden said he was not a moderate Joe Biden, his wife seems convinced that he has to portray himself as a moderate. She keeps using the term moderate. But he rejected that term early in the campaign or right before he joined the campaign. I think it was in April of 2019. He said, I’m not a moderate. I wish they would have called me a moderate. All those times I ran in Delaware. I’ve just been a liberal. And then he said, I’m an Obama Biden Democrat. So he’s basically running as the party man and has been the party man from the beginning. The problem is that the party has moved so far to the left, and he’s moved with it, rather than standing up against this stuff. And I think Democrats are in danger of taking a winnable election when there’s a lot of economic uncertainty, frustration about the Coronavirus, rightly or wrongly because the entire world is dealing with the same problem. But there is a willingness I think and openness in the electorate to a different leadership a different direction. And Biden is squander The opportunity by throwing his weight behind radicalism and unrest, rather than incremental change, or just responsible leadership, I don’t think people actually want change as much as they want to return to normal. And in a sense, that’s how Biden pitched his campaign in the beginning. But now he’s thrown that aside, for the sake of revolutionary institutional change against again, those are his words. He said that on a podcast with Andrew Yang, back in May, and he said many things similar since
Jason Hartman 7:28
we had Andrew Yang on the show before. So
Joel Pollak 7:32
yeah, that makes you better than the Democratic National Convention. They did not schedule him as a speaker. Oh, maybe they’ll change that, but he’s upset about it.
Jason Hartman 7:41
Well, you know, we’ve had Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Andrew Yang, Ben Carson, they’ve all been on. So you know, we like to have Opposing Viewpoints even when we don’t you know, I don’t agree with universal basic income, but I wanted to hear what he said about it. So
Joel Pollak 7:56
well, it’s good. It’s good of you to have that kind of a forum. Very few People are able to do that. So, you know that that’s, that’s very important. And, you know, kudos to Andrew Yang and the others who came on the show. Yeah. I think that they’ve been shut out of their own party’s dialogue. I mean, that’s the point. Andrew Yang is one of the more moderate members of the presidential field. And he’s not given a slot on the stage, the virtual stage at the Democratic National Convention.
Jason Hartman 8:22
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that’s a that’s a club. It’s definitely a club. But, but yeah, we, you know, even though we’re just a small media outlet, we’d like to practice something called journalism, which is sadly missing. Yes, free media, that’s for sure. So, um, you know, that’s really interesting what you say, but I guess it really comes down to what is the biggest voting bloc, right? Is it going to be these these radical revolutionary people who really don’t even know what they’re protesting about most of them? Or is it going to be the standard law and order types that, you know, Trump is appealing to? I mean, do we really isn’t a country of a bunch of anarchists and hoodlums? I mean, I can’t imagine that but maybe we do. Maybe that’s maybe the tide is turning. Unfortunately that’s pretty scary. But what are your thoughts?
Joel Pollak 9:09
I don’t know whether these protests translate into votes, keeping in mind most of these protests involve people who live in democrat run cities and states, the biggest and most crowded protests were probably here in Los Angeles. And, you know, we basically live in a one party state in Los Angeles. So unless those participants move to Nevada, in the next few weeks, where they would have to vote by mail anyway, I don’t know what the effect is going to be. You could see an effect in other places. But I have to think that in swing states like Colorado, let’s say for example, Colorado has gone democratic for the last several elections, but it’s still thought of as a swing state or a battleground state and certainly there’s an important Senate race there. But the mob that came out after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis did a lot of damage in Denver. They Actually attacked the Public Library. I think they vandalized it. There was one library, the name escapes me now may have been Denver, Maven and other city but they said, a fire inside the library which was quickly extinguished. But you can’t have that sort of spectacle and expect to impress the swing state voters. I think that most of the activity and activism has been in cities and states entirely controlled by Democrats, almost to the point where you could look at the Black Lives Matter movement as an internal revolution on the left, where they’re angry, and they tell their supporters, they should channel their anger into voting, instead of looting. That’s the more responsible leadership at least says that, but who are they voting for it same people, same Democrats, what they are doing is they’re defeating the old liberal guard. So the Eliot angles of the world are losing their seats, the Joe Crowley’s and so forth, and they’re being challenged from the far left by Alexandria. Cortez and others like that. You have a woman who just won a primary in Missouri and I forget her name. But she defeated the long term incumbent representative clay, who really that’s been sort of family seed for generations. And again, same story. She was a Black Lives Matter activist at Cory bushes her now just had to double check that Yeah, and she was a black she led Black Lives Matter protests. So that’s where you see their political impact. But again, that’s an internal it’s within the Democratic Party in the Democratic primary in in many ways that has benefited Republicans, because Republicans have been able to say, look how radical the democrats have become, you can vote for a party that elevates these radical people to leadership.
Jason Hartman 11:50
And I would agree, it’s really they’ve just gone off the rails. It seems like talk to us though about you know, the The problem is the left controls Almost all of the media, you know, and I’m including social media in that, you know, these big tech companies are so rich, they can afford to be liberal. You know, I just love the hypocrisy of all the social media companies or just big tech companies in general. How you know, it’s do what I say not what I do. None of none of these people that run those companies live in the way they suggest everybody else live. Of course, that’s the crazy world we live in. I mean, you know, they control what we see what search results we get. what shows up in our news feeds, it is really scary. I mean, Twitter is insane. I cannot believe what they’re doing. It’s, it’s absolutely Fahrenheit 451 Nazi book burning, it’s just craziness. If the message doesn’t get out any sort of a balanced message and you know, people will respond, you know, what are your thoughts?
Joel Pollak 12:58
You hit on a topic, I I enjoy talking about you almost took my favorite line away from me, which is that socialism is a luxury good. Yeah. You know, you said you said you have to be rich enough to be liberal, I like to say socialism is a luxury good. You can afford to dream about redistribution when you’re not really going to suffer too badly for it. I mean, obviously, if you’re wealthy, they’re going to take your stuff. But the wealthy first of all find ways to evade the state. They find ways to evade taxes and so forth. And secondly, they can probably live without some of the things they’re likely to get asked to give up. Whereas the practical results of socialism for the ordinary working men and women are just horrific, horrendous and you can see it now. I mean, the European countries, which we are told by our liberal betters in the media did so much better than us in dealing with Coronavirus are now stuck with a much worse off economy. They’re not going to rebound at the same rate we are they’re not adding jobs the way we are, and we have a dynamic society. Because it’s a capitalist society, socialist societies are not dynamic that cannot respond. They cannot innovate. They take initiative away from the individual. And as a result, they leave everybody poorer than they would have been otherwise. So it’s only if you have all your material needs that you could possibly imagine, catered for ad infinitum that you can think that everyone else should enjoy the same luxury that you do. The same, I suppose, the right to idleness and we’re seeing a lot of that in the streets where the masses of protesters aren’t made up of poor people, especially the looters. You know, they’re not raiding, Ferragamo, shoe stores and Dior jewelry stores to look for bread. Many of these people are well off, they arrive at the looting locations in cars, you know, they have generous stimulus payments, run employment benefits that can draw on anyway. The direction the country is headed in after this is probably going to be one of more struggle, no matter who wins. But the struggle is winnable, if Trump wins, it is not winnable if Biden wins Ask who’s going to turn out? I think that enough Americans see through the media, that the media have actually discredited themselves so much, that there are enough Americans who simply stopped paying attention and who understand what’s going on and who will turn out to vote for Trump, because they understand the danger of what we’re living through right now. If people turn out and Joe Biden wins rather than Trump, it’s either going to be because Trump does something additional. That’s particularly egregious between now and election day because I don’t think anything he’s done yet or said or tweeted, is enough to warrant him losing office. He’s certainly been controversial, but at times, that’s been a necessary tool. Certainly, the supporters think it’s been necessary for him to be brash or tough to get things done. But if we end up in a situation where Joe Biden wins, after all of these riots, and after the unrest and so forth, then perhaps the country has been lost for a while. This is something we’ll look back on in We’ll have to look for the roots of the transfer of power in 1020 years of indoctrination at schools and Hollywood culture and so forth. I do think it’s likelier that Trump will win right now, mildly likely again, I can’t really predict the outcome. But I do think he’s gaining momentum and Joe Biden is losing momentum, precisely because it seemed for a while, especially in late July or so that Biden was a shoo in to win. And once the reality of a Biden presidency in these circumstances became clear, I think many people suddenly realize they had to save the country by voting for Trump. Why in these circumstances because Biden wouldn’t have been trumped in a fair and square contest if Biden wins. Now, after all of the unrest and violence, it would amount to rewarding political violence. Once you reward political violence in any political system. It never leaves the system violence will never leave the system if it is rewarded, and we can look at countless examples of that around the world. But there’s a reason that the Friends like to rise, okay? It’s in the front French political culture. We don’t want that in our political culture, but we’re going to get it if Biden wins in this context when there’s been so much violence and Trump supporters are intimidated, physically intimidated, threatened, the media are intimidated. They won’t cover these protests properly because they get assaulted when they do. So. I think there’s going to be enough of a backlash. I think people are seeing through the media, but we’ll have to see.
Jason Hartman 17:27
Yeah, yeah. It’s, I mean, it’s vital more to win. Or if someone were to vote for Biden, I think they’re really voting for ZTE, as president because Biden is just not fit to hold office. politics aside. The man is he’s just lost it. When is he going to debate Trump? I want to see that. I mean, is this the first year we’re going to not have a debate because the dems are so afraid that Biden can’t withstand a debate? Just Where are the debates? I mean, we’re 90 days out right? Or less than that?
Joel Pollak 17:57
Yeah, I don’t know. Look, I think there’s The danger that Republicans talk themselves into believing that Biden is unable to debate, look, we’ve seen him debate on 11 occasions, he’s been able to stand up straight for an hour or two. And I think he would do the same with Trump. The difference is Trump will take the fight to him in a way that the other democrats didn’t, with rare exceptions. And the other interesting thing about it is if these debates drag on at all, you know, I think there’ll be bad for Biden, Biden never came to the spin room. Once I write about that in red November, he never came to the spin room, the way the other candidates did, in any of the debates, and I think it’s because it was simply too taxing for him physically. So I agree with you. I think he’s not he’s not 100% there. But I do think he can stand up on his own two feet for 90 minutes to two hours, and that’s gonna, that’s gonna be called a victory if he does it.
Jason Hartman 18:47
So he can pull it off for 90 minutes then. Okay, interesting. Well, anything else you want us to know? I mean, I think this could turn out like 2016 where, you know, the people on the right. We’re just so far fed up with being called names and being shouted down. They just kind of bit their tongue and went to the voting booth. And you know, that’s why it surprised everybody. And I predicted that would happen, by the way, in 2016. You know, I wasn’t sure it would happen, but I thought it would happen. I thought there was a decent chance of it. And it certainly did. That might happen again, because I mean, you know, that, it seems that the left is more willing to engage in a fight. A lot of the people on the right are just, you know, they just want to run their business and have their life. And, you know, sadly, that’s one of their mistakes, I think, is that they’re not fighters. They might fight in wars and stuff. But you know, they don’t want to start arguing with people that are just shouting them down on college campuses. And so, you know, a few of them well, but largely not Any thoughts?
Joel Pollak 19:48
Well, I think as with most things we’ll have to see, but I don’t think that we can choose a political culture. Let me let me rephrase that. I don’t think we should embrace political culture where all of us have to be fighting all the time. Yeah, it’s really not how our system is supposed to work. It is how other systems work. It’s how socialist democracies work, because socialism is about redistribution rather than growth. So there’s always a fight over who gets a bigger slice of the pie. As a result, in many countries, even ones that let’s say Americans, like, for example, Israel, Israel is routinely paralyzed by strikes. And that is because there’s almost a competition in Israel, among various political groups, to show how much of the country they can shut down, how long they’re willing to hold out for their demands. And that’s what happens when people are always on that sort of war footing internally. We have bad political divisions. They’re almost worse in Israel and what keeps them from flaring up in Israel more than they do is the perceived external threat from other enemies against which the entire country unites but in peacetime Israelis really go at each other politically, and I’ve been in Israel during some of these strikes. It’s unbelievable how bad you get. So that’s what happens under a quasi socialist system. And Israel is still very much sort of a social democracy, even though it’s been run by the right for quite a while. Yeah, I think I think we shouldn’t want people to stop attending to other affairs. We don’t want people to leave the realm of politics. Alexis de Tocqueville, in democracy in America warned against that, but he also said, the genius of America is that people pursue their self interest in with a public spirit. And so that’s what we want. We want people to be willing to defend themselves and so forth. We want people to understand where their prosperity comes from, and to appreciate how we have to defend it at the ballot box, contribute to political campaigns, come on, volunteer and all that. All that is good. But we can’t really survive as the same kind of society. We are now as a prosperous, free open society. If politics occupies a huge amount of our attention.
Jason Hartman 21:58
It’s tough. Well, you About your website and tell people where they can find the books and such.
Joel Pollak 22:03
Well I obviously write for breitbart.com but if you want to bring if you want to buy red November you can buy it anywhere books are sold, you know, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. The publisher is Center Street so Center Street as a central website that will take you to any retailer you want. The book again is red November will the contract is red for Trump or white or red for socialists. Excellent. Joel Pollak. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.
Jason Hartman 22:28
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