Unraveling The Rise Of Social Media Influence With Brent Bozell 56:19

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Well, welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for giving us a little bit of your time. Do appreciate it. A lot's going on, certainly in the political world. We're going to talk to somebody really interesting. If you don't know who Brent Bozell is, you have seen and heard the quality of his work along the way because he runs the Media Research Center and founded it. And in

exactly what the American public wants and they do incredible work. I have done

uh some events with them along the way and i gotta tell you you're going to love to hear about what the national media is really doing what they're really made of and you've seen like i said the mrc what they've done we're gonna talk a little bit about the news and then of course highlight the stupid because you know there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere so thanks again for joining us

And let me just mention, again, lots of political news, huge political news, moving every moment, some close races and whatnot still out there. But I do want to mention some things that maybe have slipped through the crack here. You may have seen this on Tucker Carlson a couple weeks ago, but I really wanted to go back and highlight this again. It's not something that should just slip through the cracks.

Creighton School of Medicine Professor Charles Camacy, I think is his last name, said that there's a bill there in Canada, a move to change the law that would allow state doctors without the consent of parents to allow mature minors. Now, mature minors. Boy, that sounds subjective, doesn't it?

to engage in euthanasia and essentially state-sponsored taking of their own life. Now, how in the world a society can gravitate at some point where the parent is not involved in that discussion, is not a participant in dealing with that situation,

That seems like a bridge too far to me. The parents should and have to be involved with a quote-unquote mature minor. Now, if you're contemplating this type of, you know, the ending of your life, you obviously have some things going on in your life. There's obviously something that's gone really, really the wrong direction.

I'm not here to judge on that, but I'm just saying to take the parents out of that equation is just fundamentally wrong. I just can't let this slide as part of our news cycle and just glance over it. I just wanted to highlight it and make us all aware. I know we got some good people who listen to the show in Canada and we care about our Canadian neighbors, those of us that are Americans.

But that just seems so fundamentally wrong with this society. But this is a Justin Trudeau special. This is, you know, the kind of places that he's taken us. It's just so disappointing that they're even having that discussion. But let's pay attention to it. All right. If that wasn't bad enough, time to bring on the stupid. Because you know what? There's somebody doing something stupid somewhere.

I really want to go down to an article that I saw. This is out a little while ago. John Ratcliffe.

He was the Director of National Intelligence. He was a colleague of mine when we were serving in the United States Congress, and he was a congressman there from Texas. He, along with Cliff Sims, who I believe was the Deputy Director for Strategy and Communications, they're essentially working with John Radcliffe, with the Director of National Intelligence, highlighting that U.S. taxpayers are money.

in Honduras is paying, we're footing the bill. You, me, anybody who's listening to this show, we're paying taxes to pay for a local drag show. And the State Department is justifying this as a promotion of diversity and inclusion. You know, and the point that John Radcliffe and Cliff Sims make, which I think is a good one, is that soft power, the soft power of the United States of America is really powerful.

But used in the right way. That's the projection of America that the Biden-Harris administration wants us to have. Is that we're out there sponsoring drag shows. I thought we were trying to solve the immigration problem. I thought climate change was like the biggest thing in the world. They're out there sponsoring drag shows to make sure that everybody feels included. That's just... Sorry. It's kind of sick, sort of disgusting, and a complete waste of taxpayer money.

I also want to highlight the abuse that Amy Coney Barrett, their Supreme Court justice, who was duly nominated and immensely qualified and confirmed as a United States Supreme Court justice. Now, I recognize that all justices probably have detractors. I don't particularly like some of the people that have been nominated on the left, and I'm sure there are plenty of people on the right that the left doesn't like.

That is the nature of the balancing of the Supreme Court. But we have crossed a barrier, a Rubicon, that I just think is a dangerous one because evidently Penguin Random House has a deal with the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett to write a book. I think it would be a widely popular book. Probably a book that I would buy, maybe a book that you would buy. But there are 500, 500 literary figures...

i think it's probably a loosely used term but 500 literary figures that have signed an open ladder demanding the penguin random house shut down the book deal because she voted to help overturn roe versus wade now for people in the literary business to suggest that the best way to deal with this is to just shut them down to ultimately engage in the cancel culture

That is so fundamentally wrong and just downright stupid. So shame on those people for doing that. All right, time to bring on Brett Boesel. I've spent some time with him. I've spent some time with their organization, the Media Research Center. Fascinating individual, rich history of background and experiences there in Washington, D.C. And they do the analytical research that everybody wants to hear and see because they're

It just feels like the traditional media isn't fair. It isn't balanced, that they are skewed politically. And the Media Research Center goes out, looks at it, takes an objective point of view, puts the numbers behind it. And that's why you continue to hear about them. So let's let's bring in and phone a friend, Brent Bozo. Hello, Brent. Hey, Jason Chaffetz.

Jason, how are you? Thank you so much for answering my call. I wasn't quite sure if we could get you to pick up. I'm here for you always. You're very kind. I say that with a big smile on my face. I've had some really good interaction with you through the years, and you take a very conservative approach to things. And you've built this organization, the Media Research Center, and it's just fabulous. It fills a void of

like none other. And I just want to chat with you about the MRC, about today's politics. You know, we've got this crazy liberal bent in the media that I really had my eyes open to when I got elected to Congress. And then I thought, how are we going to expose this? What are we going to do about it? And

That's where I got an exposure to you and the MRC, and it's just been wonderful. So maybe if we can kick things off, just let's go back to little Brent, little growing up. I want to hear a little bit about growing up, what it was like for you, and then how you ultimately got to this point where you founded this organization and what it's doing.

Well, thank you. I mean, that gives me an opportunity to shamelessly plug a book. Isn't that what we all do, Jason? I do. I wrote a book. We published it a few months ago. And it's got a lot of...

Very positive feedback. It's called Stops Along the Way, and it's a collection of stories. They're all true stories. It's not a biography. It's not a memoir. It's just inflection points.

But the first chapter deals with my childhood, which is different. And I didn't make anything up, but people will believe I made things up. It is because it was a fascinating childhood.

dropping names because it's important for the sake of the narrative. I'm the nephew of Bill Buckley's, and my father was one of the early leaders in the conservative movement, one of the founders of National Review, et cetera, et cetera, and very strong Catholics.

And we grew up in a town 70 miles outside of Washington, D.C., in a little village called Huntley, one of 10 children, Catholics, in a place only 70 miles away from the United States,

And yet you could find yourself as a Catholic in a place where within a week of having moved in, we had the proverbial cross lit on our front yard. All right. So you go through this experience growing up. And then then what happened? I mean, you're you're growing up, even though you're close proximity to the Capitol, but it's not that close to the Capitol. Right. It's not like you just got the car and drove there every day.

But how did the world change for you? Well, there was a phase two of growing up, which was my father...

had fallen in love with Spain after World War II, having hitchhiked to Europe and found a little town, a little village in Spain called El Escorial. El Escorial was then completely unknown to the outside world. Today, it's one of the most fashionable towns in Europe.

But it was unknown because this was during Franco's day where there was a worldwide embargo against the country because of things in World War II. And that's another discussion altogether. My dad fell in love with Catholics.

Spain, and we went there in 61, spent two years. And then I returned and I did my high school, three years of high school in Spain in a Spanish school in a complex built by Philip II in 1588. So I don't care. Anybody can tell me how old their school is. My answer is, did you go to school at some place that was founded in 1588? If so, you can brag. Yeah.

But that was an experience. And it was the next two chapters in my book, writing about that, because that was another time that in today's society, Jason, we wouldn't comprehend in the United States. Can you imagine living in a society today where you're a 16-year-old girl in a town and you can walk around?

through the streets of the town at 2 o'clock in the morning and not have a single worry or a six-year-old boy and go in somewhere into town to play kickball with your friends at 10 p.m. while your parents are in a cafe, I don't know,

half a mile away having a cup of coffee and not a worry in the world. That was Spain back then. So I lived in that world, too. And then I went to Texas and to college and then came back to Washington. I wanted to be part of this thing called the Reagan Revolution. We knew of Reagan, obviously, because of my political past.

But there was excitement in the air in 1979 because something was happening after those dreadful years of Jimmy Carter. There was a sense that there was some new idea that was starting to emerge and it was starting to take root. And I wanted to be part of it. I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I moved back to Virginia and that's where it all started.

So you get back there, Reagan's elected. The world now is changing. In fact, it seems to me there are a lot of parallels and comparisons to Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter. I mean, policy wise, the feeling and mood of the country, those things. Now, I was quite small then, but but, you know, the more you read and see and study it, it just seems like they're almost one in the same.

Yeah, a lot of parallels. Here's a difference. For his time, Jimmy Carter could be a mean-spirited SOB, but he was Mother Teresa compared to today's Democrat. And the Democratic Party...

was conservative compared to today's Democratic Party. There was a sense of malaise, just as with the Democrats today. They didn't have a plan B. Their plan B was a continuation of plan A. And all they could do was try to tear down this guy, Ronald Reagan.

They ran into the bustle of a problem that Ronald Reagan was just insanely likable. The more you attacked him, the more he gave you a good-hearted chuckle and a joke.

You know, Donald Trump responds to an attack with the right-hand cross that's far more powerful than your left-hand hook. Ronald Reagan responded with a smile and a joke, was the eternal optimist, and had a bold vision. The media at the time, I remember this, Jason, so vividly. Ronald Reagan was, and Bill Buckley was asked,

a couple of years before he died as part of a symposium to name his favorite president or the most important president in America. And everybody had named the usual suspects, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, whatever. Bill Buckley said, Ronald Reagan. And they looked at him horrified.

And he said, he's the best and he's the smartest. They looked at him doubly horrified because Ronald Reagan was supposed to be a stupid actor. Ronald Reagan was smarter than all of them combined. He understood that when he communicated, the great communicator never communicated to the media. He always communicated through the media.

and he was always talking to the Average Joe, and he called the Average Joe an American hero. His concept was simply, if you do your part for America, you're a hero. If you work at 7-Eleven, you're a hero. If you're a schoolteacher, you're a hero. If you're a bus driver, you're a hero. It doesn't matter. If you do your part for America, you're a hero. And he would make everyone feel heroic.

This is why patriotism exploded under Ronald Reagan, because suddenly America was really cool as a country after years of malaise under the Democrats. It was a cool place to be. And that's what was contagious about him. And you wanted to be part of that movement.

So what was your part in that movement? I mean, your heart was in it. You certainly had the family connections. What was your part? Well, you know, it was crazy. I came to Washington with a wife and two newborns, I guess one and a half and a half. And I needed this crazy thing called a job.

And so I had to take the first thing I could get, which was a fundraising job at a group called the National Conservative Political Action Committee. And I remember vividly what my my I got paid fifteen thousand two hundred dollars, not four hundred dollars, two hundred dollars. And but I took the job because I needed a job. And I figured I'd do that and then get a real job at some point.

The National Conservative Political Action Committee was the largest conservative group in the country at the time. And within about a year, I was the finance director for it. And I went on to become the president of it. But in 1983, I was visiting, I was in an airport at the Avis parking lot in a DFW airport in Texas with my boss at the time. And I suggested to him that I

We were already like that Greek figure Sisyphus, the fellow pushing the boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down and flatten him because of the medium. Because no matter how good our story was, and this is 1983, no matter how good our story was, no matter how sound our principles and positive the message was,

It went in as prime rib in one end, but when it went through the filter of the media, it came out raw sewage on the other. And the American people, think about this, Jason. At the time, what did we mean by media? There were three networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and this fledgling little thing called CNN.

The newspapers were dominated by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times. You had two wire services, AP and UPI, and three major magazines, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News. They all had one thing in common. Every single one of them was liberal.

There wasn't a single, not one single media outlet that was conservative, making me look back on that and wonder how in the world did Ronald Reagan ever get elected? What you hit, and I'm not kidding you, I'm not exaggerating here, Jason. If you were a conservative and you wanted to communicate with the American people at that time,

Paul Harvey was a radio commentator out of Chicago, and he had an afternoon commentary for about 20 minutes.

That was one. You had Human Events, a news, a weekly newspaper with 30,000 subscriptions. That was two. The National Review magazine that was published every two weeks. That was the third way. And the fourth way was putting a message in the bottle and throwing it into the Atlantic Ocean. That was, we didn't, we couldn't communicate. We didn't have talk radio. You didn't have any of those things.

But Rush Limbaugh revolutionized everything in 1989 or '88, a year right after the MRC was launched, actually.

But we didn't have anything. And so my argument to my boss then was that until we did something about the media, I didn't think the conservative movement could really advance beyond this state-of-the-art figure called Ronald Reagan. At that time, we looked at a survey that was done by the LA Times, and it showed that 75% of the American people believed the media were objective.

Think about that. Believe the media were objective. And there is no such thing, Jason. You and I know that. It's no such thing. Unless you've had a frontal lobotomy, you have an opinion. And so a bias is going to come out somehow in the news. Yes, 75% believe that what they were getting from Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings back then was objective truth.

I submitted to my boss that while the conservative movement had all manner of organizations, political action committees, foundations, associations, we had business groups, we had all manner of different weapons. There wasn't a single national organization that was confronting the news media, which were the most powerful arm of the left.

And until we could do that, that I thought we were never going to win a lasting battle. But what was missing was an effort to analyze what the media were doing. Some conservatives had a problem with the liberal media, but nobody could prove anything about bias other than, well, anecdotally, Dan Rather said something last night that was liberal. That

That doesn't mean he's liberal. It just means that last night he said something. So the Media Research Center was born as part of a foundation. And then in 1987, we opened it as its own organization. And the rest is history. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Brent Bozell right after this.

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So let's go back to those days of, you know, the Walter Conkites and the Tom Brokaw. I mean, for whatever reason, our household seemed to watch an awful lot of Tom Brokaw and 60 Minutes and, you know, those types of shows. But you had to. That's all you had. How much worse is it today? Because...

I still got the sense that back then that was better than, but maybe I was just totally oblivious and naive and unknowing because there was nothing to compare it to. Jason, they were public enemy number one. They were, we went after them.

in a rabid fashion and they fought back in a rabid fashion and we did a lot of our fighting in places like CNN that would invite me on during the Gulf War to critique their own coverage of the Gulf War can you

Imagine CNN today inviting a conservative to have basically a free microphone to critique them for an hour. That's the media then. So what's the difference? And I say this kind of half jokingly, but.

But really, quite seriously, I long for the good old days of Dan Rather and the good old days of Tom Brokaw and the good old days of Peter Jennings. They were liberals and they had a bias, but they weren't leftists. What you have today is an utterly weaponized leftist movement.

political movement in the national news media back in the 1990s and late 1980s, they would argue incorrectly, but they would argue that they were objective and they didn't have a liberal bias.

They could put forward an argument to say that. Today, notice, Jason, nobody even tries. They don't even try. I mean, you would laugh if CNN said today that they were leftists. I could go down and I could visit. I would have meetings of my trustees, my top supporters. We would meet at

CNN in Atlanta with the president and a team of vice presidents. That's the kind of relationships you had then while we went after each other. But there was mutual respect

We went out of our way to praise them. A few times they did things right. They would listen to us. They would correct things. Can you imagine NBC listening to anybody and correcting something today? Not in a million years. So what happened along the way? What happened to these so-called journalism schools? Because it seems like the people that are graduating now...

And, you know, some have some haven't, but they come not with the skill set as much as a set of activism and a mindset of activism rather than objectivity. You know, my friend and former colleague there in Congress, he used to like to say, you know,

As it relates to investigations, they have never, ever seen a Democratic investigation that was wrong and that it should continue in perpetuity.

but they could never ever justify or allow a Republican investigation to ever have any legitimacy whatsoever. And that's the transition that I think we're about to undergo. But the underlying premise here is that what happened to the Columbia School of Journalism and some of these other institutions that are supposed to teach these kids objectivity and just reporting the news? Because that doesn't seem to happen.

No, you know, it's a very good question. And Jason, I'm not altogether sure that I know the answer or that anyone knows the answer. But if there is an inflection point, I would suggest it was something happened during the Clinton administration.

I would suggest there's two points, two inflection points. One is the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton arrived in Washington with a swirl of scandal

around him with all manner of controversies. Whitewater was just one of them. Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broderick, the rape of Juanita Broderick. I mean, there was bad, bad stuff swirling around him. The media had to make a choice, confront it and investigate it or sweep it under the rug.

And they chose to sweep it under the rug. And here's the evidence. I could go back to the memory banks and give me about 10 minutes and I'll come up with 20 different controversies. I'm exaggerating, maybe 15 controversies.

different controversies slash scandals surrounding Bill Clinton. And where investigative journalism is concerned, here's the reality. They never got to the bottom of a single one of those scandals. They didn't want to do it. And I think at that point was where they lost their way journalistically. You saw that repeated again during the Obama administration with people like Hillary Clinton.

The media chose not to investigate any of the Obama scandals unless there was a FOIA and you guys in Congress held hearings, at which point they still wouldn't cover it. But think about Richard Nixon. Think about how Woodward and Bernstein and the rest of the friends would not let

go of Watergate until they got to the bottom of it. They've been doing the same thing with Trump, even buying falsehoods they knew were falsehoods. And here we go again, refusing to recognize the fact that they were falsehoods. But do you feel like, I mean, in a large part, a lot of the immediate research center's work is probably responsible for this. But I get the sense that

like the American people are onto their game. I get the sense that they, they understand that. Is that a consequence of having an alternative that has more balance in, in a place like a Fox news that's publishing this podcast, obviously, or is it social media? Is it the fact that we can clip and replay and, and send out our clips ourselves? Like it seems to me, and I don't know if I have anything to,

you know, objective other than my perception of it, that the American people understand that, yeah, there really is a bias.

well um again yes and no on the answer on that uh when when i remember the first meeting i had uh with with my donors uh in 1987 i think that i'm not kidding you i think there were three um and they weren't even donors yet i was trying to convince them and uh maybe four and we were sitting around a table

And one lady said, I'll never forget these words. She said, when I gave her the pitch, she said, Brent, with all due respect,

Who do you think you are? Now, this was an excellent question. The media research then was a staff of seven. We had seven phones because we got a good deal on them. We only had two desks. So five people didn't even have desks. We had a rented office.

computer and a black and white television set that that was the media the the National Organization called the media research center and we were going up against a multi-billion dollar industry in the news media my argument to her was uh twofold one that if we didn't do it she should stop donating to all her other causes because nothing was going to succeed so long as it had to go through the filter of the media

But secondly, and more importantly, if we believed in the free market system, and if we were able to expose the media and simply educate the American people that what they were getting was not objective truth, but subjective opinion, if we believed in market economics, there would be a market alternative created.

that would want where people would go to. So when Rush, God love him, Rush, I don't know how many times credited us for his success because he said, had it not been for us, there wouldn't have been a market demand for what he did. Well, that's a joke because Rush Limbaugh created Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was one of the most successful enterprises in the history of this nation.

But it is true that we did create a market demand and there was a market with that market demand which has been filled since then in many, many different ways in television by Fox, God bless Fox, with social media, online, all these different things. So

the conservative voice is getting through. But here's the new threat that's emerged. And Jason, it's a frightening one because it's a direct threat to the democratic process. Whether we like it or not, people still watch NBC or CBS or ABC or CNN or read the New York Times or the Washington Post. Those people

are now the victims of an extraordinary disinformation campaign. That disinformation campaign is gone beyond the bias by commission, where you take a story and you twist it. It is now far more nefarious. It's the bias by omission, where they deliberately choose not to report a story.

And let me tell you, Jason, how dangerous that has become to democracy. You may believe, you may not believe that the elections in 2020 were stolen. I will argue this and I will argue this convincingly because I've got scientific evidence. The media, the news media stole the 2020 elections. What do I mean by that?

We took a survey of Joe Biden's voters in the seven swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. We asked them a series of seven questions

Did they know a certain issue? If they didn't, we asked them, those who didn't, would you have voted for Biden if you had known this? And then we took that number and we put it across the spectrum. We asked questions like, did you know that Kamala Harris is to the left of Bernie Sanders? Now, don't you think if Donald Trump

had chosen the most right-wing senator in America as his running mate, that would have been a national news story. The fact that Kamala Harris had a voting record to the left of a socialist ought to have been a story. Over 50% of Democrats had no idea about that.

We asked them, had you known, would you have voted for Biden? Enough of them said they wouldn't, 4 point some percent or whatever. If you put that across those seven states, Trump would have won six of them. He would have won 295 electoral votes. We asked that about national, about energy independence. Did they know the GDP had grown by 33 percent in the last year? Did they know that 11 million jobs have been created in the last four

three months, those series of questions. Here's the big one that we asked. Did they know about Hunter Biden and the laptop? A full 45.1% of Biden's voters had never heard of Hunter Biden and the laptop. Let me repeat that. 45.1% had never heard of him. Then we asked them,

had you known about that laptop would you have voted for Biden now would you have voted for Trump would your would you have voted for Biden 9.4 percent said they would not have voted for Biden you take that 9.4 percent and you put it in those swing states Donald Trump

would have won Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, would have won every single swing state, would have won 311 electoral votes, an absolute landslide. If the media had only reported

of news and witness what happened since the election. You now have the New York Times that completely buried that story, now admitting several months after the elections, well, I guess we should have reported it. You now have Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at

admitting Facebook deliberately censored that story because the Justice Department told them they needed to do that. So you now have the unequivocal evidence, the media themselves admitting they censored a story. They altered the democratic election of 2020. And my fear is, Jason, that they'll try to do it again.

Yeah. I, you know, these so-called, uh, intelligence officials that came out and said, you know, what they said that it was, you know, Russian disinformation and all that. How can that not be a tier one story on the backside when it gets verified that it really is his laptop? I mean, and so many of those people are still there. They're still there. Yeah. Yeah.

It is stunning. And tell me about your view of social media, because they've been given some special privileges, some limited liability. What's your take on social media?

Well, they are emerging as a far greater threat than the news media. Why do we say that? The numbers tell the story. NBC News, I mentioned NBC News, their nightly newscast is something like 4 or 5 million, maybe 6 million people on a good night. Compare this. Now, Facebook, 12.7 billion people.

people are on Facebook. Twitter, 700,000 plus people are on Twitter. All news is now made on Twitter. YouTube, just statistics here. YouTube, 5 billion, that's with a B, 5 billion videos are downloaded every single day on YouTube. Google, 92.4%

of all searches worldwide go through Google. Now, how important is that? We just finished a study. We released it last week and I was shocked by this study.

We looked at the top 12, the 12 most contested Senate races in America today to see how Google was covering everything. Everything is on the first page of Google. Less than 1% of the public ever goes beyond page one. So if you're on page two, you might as well be on Mars because nobody knows you exist.

We looked at those 12 races. In 10 of the 12 races, the Democrats were listed ahead of the Republicans. In seven of those 12 races, the Republicans didn't exist on page one. They were on page two.

This is a deliberate attempt to swing the campaigns. You've had Twitter. Look, the last four presidential campaigns were decided by social media. Barack Obama used Facebook.

brilliantly in 2008. Nobody saw the strategy that his side employed. They were they got to give them got to give them all the political credit in the world, although they're the most dishonest SOBs I've ever known. But they pulled off a masterpiece. They knew

that the leftist worldview of Barack Obama was not supported by very many people. They had a staunchly minority, I don't mean black, I mean size, parcel of the American electorate. They knew that.

They did something that was unlike anything done before in conventional politics. You start with your base in the primary, as you know, and then in the general, you go towards the middle to try to capture the 10, 15, 20 percent in the middle. And that's how political equations go.

Now, Barack Obama did something entirely different in 2008. He started with the far left, and he ended with the far left. He did it through Facebook, where he built an army of followers and had them built up and energized to such a degree that his campaign made the calculation, my minority can beat your majority if I have my minority more energized than your majority.

And that is precisely what he pulled off against McCain in 2008. In 2012, Obama doubled down on Facebook again. He spent $100 million on Facebook. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney on election day was selling baseball caps for $25. He had no concept what he was doing on social media. And again, Obama won. In 2016,

Trump went to social media, but he chose Twitter and he put his eggs in the Twitter basket and he built up the biggest following in the world. The media could have news media could attack him all day long when he was doing those crazy tweets. He was communicating in his way as Ronald Reagan committed, communicated in his way. He was communicating directly with his followers and it worked beautifully in 2020.

Twitter banished him and censored him, and they cost him the election. Had he been allowed to communicate in 2020 on Twitter, that's another way he would have won the presidential campaign. So the social media people have controlled the last four elections

They're playing a huge role today in the public conversation and things you're allowed to do. Isn't it great what Elon Musk is? Well, that's what I was going to ask you is with the meltdown from the left. I mean, people want to like leave the country. It's just so funny to see these celebrities and these leftists say, oh, my goodness. You mean there's going to be balance? We can't operate in an atmosphere where both sides get to tell their story. Yes.

Well, you know, I can say, you know, flippantly that there was a report in The Economist I saw about an hour ago where in the last three days, Republicans have identified

477,000 followers they didn't have four days ago before Elon Musk walked in. And by the way, that kitchen sink stunt, I mean, I've got, look, I have been responsible for some good stunts in my time. I have watched in awe, watching others do better. But for him to walk into, into, into,

to twitter twitter with this let this sink in sign i mean i i i felt i if i've been driving a car i would hit it what a stump that was um you know and the employee meltdown is just cracking me up too because you would think if you were an employee and suddenly elon musk who's you know everything's turned to gold that he's touched um

And all those greenies who bought a Tesla helped fund the fortune that now allowed him to purchase Twitter. It just puts a big smile on everybody's face. Yeah, and what that should tell –

everybody Jason is the degree to which the the the patients were running the asylum at Twitter uh you know it went when uh Twitter was was unmasked for its shadow banning efforts um a few years ago um where uh the the shadow band technology is such that you are someone and you think you're communicating um with the public your message is never getting through and it turned out

people being shadow banned were all from the House Freedom Caucus, conservative members of the Republican Party. I mean, just imagine that coincidence. So that came out and it was some mid-level person somewhere who did that. There's zero, and I mean zero assurances

that that ever stopped. This is something that people, I think, thought, well, once it was exposed, that means they stopped it. No, these people, you've got tens of thousands of people working there. Palo Alto, I mean, that Silicon Valley is the most radical left-wing organization

hotspot in America today. They see themselves on a mission. They know how powerful they are. And that's the thing. They know how powerful they are. They know their power extends worldwide. What you're looking at, Jason, is this is the greatest threat to free speech in the history of man that we're seeing right now. Because you're being told if you either will conform to

to what we want to our worldview, or you're not allowed to communicate with your fellow man. I just gave you those numbers. Just imagine if you want to communicate with somebody on Facebook, you're not allowed to say certain words. So then ultimately, you're now having the censorship of thoughts.

thought. Now you think about something, I better not say that. So it's affecting how you think about things. It's that nefarious and that dangerous. We've never seen this in the history of man, where they have put down rules, and the rule applies to Poland, and it applies to Bosnia, and it applies to Tanzania, and it applies to the United States.

It really is stunning. Look, and I lived through that. You know, this whole shadow banning, I was on that list because I can tell you I'd put out a... Were you really? Oh, yeah. I put out something that says, oh, you know, nice night with my wife and look at this beautiful sunset and cut it. You know, I had...

hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers and it would go out to thousands and thousands of people and then i would say something like uh i think biden's wrong on energy policy

And it was retweeted like, you know, six times. Like, really? I got 500 plus thousand people on Twitter and only six of them liked my saying that? I don't think so. And so, yeah, a lot more in that conversation, I think, to be had along the way. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back right after this.

Brent, what the MRC has done is truly remarkable because it takes objective analysis and quantifies it in a way that is just, I mean, they can't deny it. And I hope you continue to do that and expose it and show it for what it is because there's a lot of people that maybe feel like that. But then when they see the black and white of the numbers and the statistics, they're

the number of minutes. I love it when you do the minutes of how much airtime this was given versus how much this was given, whether it's the Jesse Smollett story or whatever it is. Oh, they don't even run it. And that kind of work does great. But before you go, because we've gone a little bit long here, Brent, I got to ask you some rapid questions just to get to know you a little bit better. Okay. Go ahead. All right. First concert you attended. First concert.

What concert I attended? I would say the Moody Blues. That's legit. That would be good. This high school that you went to way back in the day, what was the mascot?

Oh, they didn't have one. They just flogged people they didn't like. These were Agostinian monks. They whipped you. All right. Well, that's one way to do it. Okay. Any favorite pet along the way? Did you have pets growing up?

yeah well in the book uh i actually one of the things we read about his pets um and and uh there wasn't an animal we didn't have uh but yeah it's always the dog that you remember the most it's all it's always yeah yeah all right if you could invite one person over dead or alive one person over break bread share an evening with who would that be stonewall jackson

Wow, you didn't even pause to have to think about that one. Why Stonewall Jackson? Well, I'm looking at his picture right now on my wall that my children gave me years ago. I'm a Virginian. Stonewall Jackson was one of the most extraordinary military commanders in history. Stonewall Jackson was also a –

A magnificent personality, very, very complex. Some people would say very eccentric, which he probably was. But he was a brilliant man. I would say he and Robert E. Lee. We could spend another hour talking about that, and we'd be done, and you'd be cursing everybody who ever suggested Robert E. Lee's statue be taken down. There was no man in the United States of America who said,

who did more to try to heal the divisions on the war than Robert E. Lee after the war. And that is an undeniable fact. But Stonewall Jackson, because he was such a brilliant commander, I'd love to get inside his head. Interesting. Interesting. All right. What unique talent, Brent Bozell, what unique talent do you bring to the table that nobody really knows about?

uh i wish i wish i had continued uh but i played a pretty good guitar once no that's good that's good you can always pick that guitar back up uh but but once you hear me play today you say please brent put it well let me let's do a little practicing first but yeah that'd be good uh a big one for me pineapple on pizza yes or no absolutely with ham absolutely and a good beer

There's only, no, wet fruit on pizza. I didn't say it was my favorite. I didn't say it was my favorite. If you asked me, I'd say pepperoni calzone, but pineapple on pizza, yes, it can be done. And you can keep your manhood and have one, be him, her, him, him, and have a pineapple. Yes, you can. All right, last question. Best advice you ever got.

Don't ever let anything control you. And that was the argument that my parents put to me about stopping smoking cigarettes. They both quit, but it was don't let anything ever control you. Interesting. Interesting.

uh, Brent Bozell, the media research center. Thank you so, so, so much for joining us. And, and, uh, for those of you that haven't seen that work, uh, you see it quoted and talked about a lot on Fox news and elsewhere. And it really does illuminate things in the, the liberal bias that is, uh, pervasive in, in the national media. And, uh,

A lot of good data that's coming out of that organization. Thanks to Brent. I'm glad you founded it and got those three, four people to sit around and say, you know what? If you don't help fund this thing, you might as well not do anything else because I think you're probably on to something and the world's a better place for you doing it. So thanks for joining us on the Jason in the House podcast. I do appreciate it. Jason, you're a great friend. Thank you. All right. I can't thank Brent Bozell for joining us. I can't thank him enough. He's just a great friend.

energetic figures got a real vision of where this is going and thank goodness he set this up and that they're moving thing in the right direction because i think it benefits us all and and creates a little check and balance on the people that are supposed to be a check and a balance uh and that is our our national media so uh this again i can't thank him i thank him enough i hope you're able to rate this podcast i hope you're able to subscribe to the podcast

Now, you can listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. So when you come back next time, just keep that in mind. Again, thank you again for joining us. We'll be back with more next week. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

This is Jimmy Fallon inviting you to join me for Fox Across America, where we'll discuss every single one of the Democrats' dumb ideas. Just kidding. It's only a three-hour show. Listen live at noon Eastern or get the podcast at foxacrossamerica.com.