In this interview, Dennis Prager welcomes Joel Pollak, senior editor at Breitbart and author of the ebook Neither Free Nor Fair: The 2020 US Presidential Election. Pollak argues that the 2020 election failed to meet basic international standards for a free and fair election, citing issues such as vote‑by‑mail expansion, media bias, censorship by big‑tech platforms, political violence, and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. He draws on his experience observing elections in Southern Africa to outline standards like secret ballots, free expression, and security from intimidation, and claims the United States fell short on all of them. The conversation covers the book’s chapter headings—Fear, Russian Collusion, Media Bias, Impeachment, Coronavirus, Race Riots, Big Tech, Vote‑by‑Mail, Political Violence, The Military, The Polls, The Debates, Hunter Biden’s Laptop, The Vote, and Legal Challenges—while emphasizing the need for truthful discourse and robust First Amendment protections. Pollak also critiques YouTube’s policy of removing alleged election‑fraud content, arguing that such suppression undermines democratic debate. The interview ends with a call to recognize the election’s shortcomings and to prevent future “illiberal plebiscites.”
Chapters
So the smearing of Breitbart is actually a compliment. Joel Pollack is a senior editor there, and he has a brand new ebook out, electronic book. You can get it at Amazon, and it's called Neither Free Nor Fair: The 2020 US Presidential Election. Joel, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Dennis Prager. Great to be with you.
Really?
Yes, really. I love your show. I'm a big listener. I listen every day, so it's a great privilege to join you on the air.
I thank you. I'm very touched. I was horsing around and I got a compliment out of it. That was very sweet. By the way, I don't understand something. In your book it says the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.
Is that what it says?
Yes. Did you know that?
No, I didn't know that. But, uh, you know, if you ask a lot of Americans, they think we had a fictitious election, so maybe that makes sense. I don't know if that's a disclaimer that Amazon puts in, but we have had an election that is called the Democratic election but did not resemble anything that any rational person would accept as a Democratic election. We had political violence, we had censorship, we had military intervention of a certain kind, and we had a debate commission that was stacked against one side in favor of the other. And we had the rules change in the middle. I mean, vote by mail is probably the biggest factor in this election, and it was adopted at the behest of Democrats and over the objections of Republicans. That's not fair.
That's correct. So your chapters are Fear, Russian Collusion, Media Bias, Impeachment, Coronavirus, Race Riots, Big Tech, Vote by Mail, Political Violence, The Military, The Polls, The Debates, Hunter Biden's Laptop, The Vote, and then Legal Challenges. What you just described though, even before I read your chapter headings, What you just described is indeed a perfect summary of the unprecedented nature of this election. So I sit here as an American and I think, how do we work our way out of this? What do you think?
The first thing is to tell the truth about what happened. And we have to be truthful about the fact that this was not a free and fair election. What I do in the book is I zoom out from the question of voter fraud. So there's a lot of litigation going on right now, and the Supreme Court cases that may come up, and that's all very important, but voting and the counting of votes, although obviously the most crucial thing that happens in an election, they happen at the end of the election. They're part of a process, and the process goes on for months, and the process has certain standards, and I've had the benefit of living and working overseas in an emerging democracy. I worked in South Africa for 7 years and traveled in Southern Africa, and I had the benefit of learning about the international standards for a free and fair election. And these include things like the absolute right to a secret ballot, the ability to express political opinions without interference. They include the right to seek, receive, and impart information. And they include security, freedom from fear, that you can engage in political activity without violence. And when you look at the 2020 election in the United States, we fell short of all of those standards. If we were to send an observer mission to a foreign country, we would send them with those standards and say, evaluate whether Zimbabwe is living up to those standards. Well, we have failed those standards in our own country. And I think it's important to say that because because we do not want to repeat this experiment in, shall we say, illiberal plebiscites ever again.
I would say that neighboring Zambia had less intimidation in their elections. Zimbabwe's a, you know, unfortunately a terrible example, as you know.
Right.
But I think Botswana— I'm not being cute, I know Africa somewhat and been there. Uh, and I believe that there was less intimidation and fraud in, in a fair number of African countries' elections than in ours.
Well, I was in the region during the 2005 elections in Zimbabwe, and I learned a lot from that because the Zimbabweans became very good at convincing the people they needed to convince that their elections were actually 100% kosher. So what they did was they made sure Election Day was orderly and peaceful, and they made sure that the ballot counting was accurate. But what they did in the months leading up to the election, throwing poor people out of their homes, arresting and jailing political opponents, drowning out opposition media, all of that happened in the buildup. And so Human Rights Watch, which is a left-wing organization, they said in that election that you can't look at the Election Day itself, you can't look at the vote itself, and Election is a process. And I really believe that. And that's actually the international perspective on this. You can't have an election— let's take the one of the later chapters in my book, the Hunter Biden laptop story, which is everywhere today. You can't have an election where there's an important piece of information about allegations of corruption and foreign influence for one of the candidates, and it simply is censored. And people who try to spread that that article or that information suffer penalties, both personal and professional. They lose their access to social media, they get their accounts shut down, and there are people who are smeared with allegations of Russian disinformation and so forth. I mean, it's one of the most egregious media cover-ups in American history, and we all watched it happen. And, and, and now, of course, today we find out Hunter Biden is under investigation for tax violations, but the tax violations have to do with all these foreign business deals that were on the laptop that the New York Post tried to warn us about in October. So we saw this happen in real time where we could not have a real open discussion about a very, very important news story. This affects the national security of the United States, but we somehow weren't allowed to talk about it.
We're not allowed to talk about it now. Has— who was it, Facebook or Google, that announced anything put up on the internet to challenge the results of this election will be called misinformation and deleted?
It'll be your old nemesis. YouTube did that. It was YouTube that said any videos that alleged that there was fraud and that the fraud affected the election, we're going to take them down and we're going to take down those channels. And it's already had an effect because there are news channels that have had to change their coverage in order to stay on YouTube because they are afraid they're going to lose their accounts. And of course, this is in the middle of a Supreme Court appeal. This is in the middle of ongoing legal disputes about the elections. So it's really crazy that you can't have an open public debate about something that's moving through the legal process, the legal and constitutional process. This is the opposite of how we have dealt with these situations historically. I mean, historically, the answer to inaccurate stories is to—
Is accurate stories.
Yeah, the accurate story, exactly.
I just want people to understand, imagine if YouTube were run by people on the right who had an equal desire to suppress free speech. Then realize, like, America was founded in 1619, those would be deleted. That would not be allowed. That's misinformation. It's misinformation that the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign. Anything about that, no longer available. But if we ran YouTube, we would allow that. If you want to lie on behalf of the left, we will allow you to lie on behalf of the left. It is not our business to shut down what we consider lies.
That's right. And the First Amendment is there as a remedy for lies.
That's right.
Yes, it is there to protect speech, not just that you agree with and that you can verify, but that you might disagree with vehemently. And there are so many debates we've had in this country that have been settled finally in the right direction because we allowed people to find their way to the truth themselves. And in fact, during an election is precisely when you want the broadest freedom of speech, the broadest freedom of assembly. That's the last time when you want to restrict or suppress.
Exactly. All right, we'll be back in a moment. His book is a new ebook, Neither Free Nor Fair.
