00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to The Mark Simone Show.
00:00:02
Speaker 2: Live from the WOR LifeVac studios.
00:00:08
Speaker 1: Well, Matt Towery is one of the great pollsters in America. I mean, a real pollster, not those fake polls you see publicly. But Matt Towery, great pollster. But he's got a book out that's very important we want you to read. The new book is called The Mirage Machine. And it's all about how this whole fake media business academic government complex got started and what it's doing. And we'll get to that with the great Matt Towery. Matt, how you doing?
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Mark, so happy to be with you. And let everybody know the first part of that title is the honoring of ignorance, the honoring of ignorance. And let me tell you, we've got more honoring of ignorance going on in this election season than I can count. And I'm so happy to have a chance to sort of share my thoughts with your listeners today.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. We'll get to the book in a second. Let me just ask you, it's 18 days till the midterms. What's going to happen? How does it look right now?
00:00:59
Speaker 2: You know, we get this every time, Mark. You're so used to it. We get these polls that come out and show the Democrats are always way ahead and the Republicans are way down. And then somebody like a Nate Silver or 538 before they shuttered that bunch comes out and says, oh, it's over, you know, give up. And then all of a sudden the Republican, you know it, And so all of a sudden, the Republicans start to inch their way back in. And now all of a sudden, people are nervous. And I'll tell you a reason they are. They're nervous because there is a massive turnout of older voters like I've never seen before. I've been polling for 26 years. I've been in politics forever. And I have never seen seniors voting at the level they are now. In fact, in Georgia, which is my bellwether state because it could go 50-50 either way. In Georgia, 80% of the votes in early votes as of yesterday– we're 55 and over and they vote Republican.
00:01:51
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:01:52
Speaker 2: And isn't that something?
00:01:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, so the fake polls that are, you know, supposed to discourage people, the fake news trying to convince Republicans to stay home, it's not working. Is that what we're saying?
00:02:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it never has worked. You know, I, um, I predicted Trump would win in 2016. Everybody thought it was crazy in 2020. You know, we knew that Trump was, was, you know, with the pandemic, it really hurt him, but, He did very well. He didn't win, at least by the count. But he was much closer than the pollsters had it. In 2024, they all said he was going to lose that also. And he beat Harris handily. So I think we're looking at another one of these mirage machines where what they do is the media harps on a certain issue. This time it's gas prices. They don't tell anybody the gas prices were just as high under Joe Biden. And that inflation was 8.5% versus 3.7% now. You don't hear that, do you? No. They keep that from us. And instead, they want to focus on the one thing that makes everybody feel like they're so miserable and they're not doing well. And I don't think the public's buying it. Yeah.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: So a lot of criticism of the Republicans didn't do the right messaging. They didn't get their message out. What did they do wrong, if anything?
00:03:10
Speaker 2: Well, I think the only thing they could have done which I wish they had, is to leapfrog over this biased mirage machine media and put out ads earlier letting people know that we have the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the economy is expanding, the GDP is up, that we have more disposable income because of the tax cuts, and that more people were traveling during Labor Day, this last holiday we had, More people flew and drove than any other time in the history of our country. Does that sound like a country that's in recession? No. And I think that message could have gotten out there sooner. But boy, Donald Trump, he is working his rear end off, going everywhere he can, because turnout is what midterms are about. And he is turning people out to the polls.
00:03:57
Speaker 1: All right, Matt Towery. But here's the problem, which brings us to your book, The Honoring of Ignorance, This Mirage Machine. What you're talking about is the media, the pollsters, academia, everything creating these mirages. Explain how the book came about.
00:04:13
Speaker 2: Oh, it's funny, Mark. I was a University of Georgia student. I dropped out to work for a guy named Newt Gingrich and another guy named Mack Mattingly. Gingrich was in his first term in Congress and Mattingly was running for the U.S. Senate. He got elected. I went to D.C. So I left Georgia and ended up at Cambridge University in England, which is where I took my degree. When I was there, I started working on a book called The Honoring of Ignorance. I got a literary agent, Ann Elmo, who's well-known. She's passed away since then. And they pitched the book to all these publishers. They all said, we love it, but he's too young to say this. And now I'm 67 years old, and I'm afraid people are going to say he's too old to say this. But it's still the same thesis. It's just changed a lot with the Internet and with cable television and all the things that have happened since 40 years ago. And we have one big mirage machine. It's basically we have a media that they exclude things. They make sure you don't see things that are possible about President Trump. They make sure they harp on the things that are negative. They then get the pollsters go out there and tell you, boy, he is so unpopular. And then they get the fact checkers who come and fact check them and say, oh, everything they're saying is right. Why did a fact check our polling company? And it was Snopes. And the woman wrote it. She said, we don't know anything about this polling firm, and we can't vouch for whether they're credible. You know that we polled for the Fox affiliates around the country, owned and operated for like eight, ten years, for Politico, for Newsmax, anybody you can think of. Yet somehow she couldn't find out anything about us, so she wrote this terrible review. Great fact checker, huh? Yeah.
00:05:53
Speaker 1: So here's the problem. Obviously, you got, you know, the universities are all left wing indoctrination camps. But then the news media goes total fake news. The fact checkers got totally corrupted. They're all left wing slanted people running these fact checking sites, which what you call the mirage machine. But what what on earth can you do about it? Is it too late?
00:06:18
Speaker 2: Well, there are two things. I say at the conclusion of the book that we're going to go one of two directions. We're either going to end up with a country where the blue states have compacts with one another and they have their own laws they follow and the red states do the same with their own states. Or we're going to learn as conservatives or Republicans, people just want to get the truth out, to start every week putting ads out to say in case you've missed it. And don't quote the conservative stuff by itself. Quote NBC News and CNN because they actually have to put up this good news of what Trump is doing, but they try to hide it. So instead of hiding it, get it out there so the public is not so ill-informed going into an election. That's the most critical thing, I think, advice I would give the Republicans and conservatives going into the future.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a great book. You should get this new book. It's called The Honoring of Ignorance. It's all about the mirage machine. It's Matt Towery, the honoring of ignorance. So if you're a young guy and you just got out of college, you've been totally indoctrinated into the left. You're watching left-wing crazy media, reading left-wing fact-checkers. Is that how it's now possible for really nutty candidates, Mamdani or El-Sayed, to be elected? Is that how that happened?
00:07:37
Speaker 2: That's exactly what has happened. We've had a whole generation of people who went to school where For example, with socialism, one of the reasons that the seniors are turning out like they are is because they remember the old Soviet Union. They know what Cuba was about. They saw the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. They're not taught about this stuff now, both in secondary schools and at universities. They're told a completely different story. So they have no idea about the truth. Now, that doesn't make these people stupid. It makes them ignorant. That's different. Ignorance means you just don't know. Doesn't mean you can't learn. So we've got to make sure that we teach people the truth and get the truth out there. In fact, get this book and go to Thanksgiving dinner where I know half the room is liberal and half is conservative. Nobody's talking to each other. Give them the book. Tell them to read it and see if they can come back and debate you the next week. I guarantee you they won't be able to beat you. You'll beat them.
00:08:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. So what do you do? How would you ever take back the universities? You'd have to get rid of the faculty, the board of trustees and even if you did, wouldn't it be generations before it helped?
00:08:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. And Mark, what has to happen is the late Charlie Kirk was a great example. You've got to go to these places and you've got to tell them the truth. And Charlie lost his life for doing that. But it was a, you know, a great life that he had. I had the pleasure of knowing him a bit, being on TV with him on Fox and But we need more people like him out there. And we also need to get, like I said, into the mainstream media. Conservative media is only 25% of what people watch. Most of the news they get is from Google and Apple and on social media. The conservatives have to get their story out on those platforms. And by the way, it would be a good idea if they created one or two fact-checkers that would check things right instead of the ones that pick on us all the time. I'm sure you get picked on. I know I do. And by the way, I'm retiring as a pollster, Mark. So I don't have, I have nothing to lose. This is my last year. All right.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Well, good luck with this. I don't know. It's going to take a million years to turn things around, but if you want to, you know, it's, it's doable.
00:09:52
Speaker 2: I live in the free state of Florida and this state, when I went to law school here was as democratic as it could be. I went back to Atlanta and, had a career there, came back home to Florida, and it's as Republican as can be, and they're changing the universities. They don't let them teach all this nonsense. It will happen. At some point, the truth and freedom end up winning.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody get this book. You're going to love this book. It's called The Honoring of Ignorance. about the Mirage Machine. It's Matt Towery's new book, The Honoring of Ignorance. Go to Amazon or wherever you get your books and get the book. Matt Towery, great stuff. Thanks for being with us.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Mark, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.
00:10:30
Speaker 1: All right, take care. Hey, don't forget, coming up at noon, Buck Sexton and Clay Travis, they do a great show every day, noon to three. Then at three o'clock, you got the most listened to radio show in America, Sean Hannity. You got Jesse Kelly at six. Every night at 9. You've got to start listening to this. It's a wonderful show. Jimmy Fallon, 9 to midnight. Very funny. Very, very smart show. 9 to midnight. Then, of course, I'm here. Three hours now. Three hours every day. 9 to noon. And before I come on, it's Curtis Sliwa and Larry Menti every morning. 6 to 9. That's all here on 710WOR.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to The Mark Simone Show.
00:00:02
Speaker 2: Live from the WOR LifeVac studios.
00:00:08
Speaker 1: Well, Matt Towery is one of the great pollsters in America. I mean, a real pollster, not those fake polls you see publicly. But Matt Towery, great pollster. But he's got a book out that's very important we want you to read. The new book is called The Mirage Machine. And it's all about how this whole fake media business academic government complex got started and what it's doing. And we'll get to that with the great Matt Towery. Matt, how you doing?
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Mark, so happy to be with you. And let everybody know the first part of that title is the honoring of ignorance, the honoring of ignorance. And let me tell you, we've got more honoring of ignorance going on in this election season than I can count. And I'm so happy to have a chance to sort of share my thoughts with your listeners today.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. We'll get to the book in a second. Let me just ask you, it's 18 days till the midterms. What's going to happen? How does it look right now?
00:00:59
Speaker 2: You know, we get this every time, Mark. You're so used to it. We get these polls that come out and show the Democrats are always way ahead and the Republicans are way down. And then somebody like a Nate Silver or 538 before they shuttered that bunch comes out and says, oh, it's over, you know, give up. And then all of a sudden the Republican, you know it, And so all of a sudden, the Republicans start to inch their way back in. And now all of a sudden, people are nervous. And I'll tell you a reason they are. They're nervous because there is a massive turnout of older voters like I've never seen before. I've been polling for 26 years. I've been in politics forever. And I have never seen seniors voting at the level they are now. In fact, in Georgia, which is my bellwether state because it could go 50-50 either way. In Georgia, 80% of the votes in early votes as of yesterday– we're 55 and over and they vote Republican.
00:01:51
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:01:52
Speaker 2: And isn't that something?
00:01:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, so the fake polls that are, you know, supposed to discourage people, the fake news trying to convince Republicans to stay home, it's not working. Is that what we're saying?
00:02:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it never has worked. You know, I, um, I predicted Trump would win in 2016. Everybody thought it was crazy in 2020. You know, we knew that Trump was, was, you know, with the pandemic, it really hurt him, but, He did very well. He didn't win, at least by the count. But he was much closer than the pollsters had it. In 2024, they all said he was going to lose that also. And he beat Harris handily. So I think we're looking at another one of these mirage machines where what they do is the media harps on a certain issue. This time it's gas prices. They don't tell anybody the gas prices were just as high under Joe Biden. And that inflation was 8.5% versus 3.7% now. You don't hear that, do you? No. They keep that from us. And instead, they want to focus on the one thing that makes everybody feel like they're so miserable and they're not doing well. And I don't think the public's buying it. Yeah.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: So a lot of criticism of the Republicans didn't do the right messaging. They didn't get their message out. What did they do wrong, if anything?
00:03:10
Speaker 2: Well, I think the only thing they could have done which I wish they had, is to leapfrog over this biased mirage machine media and put out ads earlier letting people know that we have the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the economy is expanding, the GDP is up, that we have more disposable income because of the tax cuts, and that more people were traveling during Labor Day, this last holiday we had, More people flew and drove than any other time in the history of our country. Does that sound like a country that's in recession? No. And I think that message could have gotten out there sooner. But boy, Donald Trump, he is working his rear end off, going everywhere he can, because turnout is what midterms are about. And he is turning people out to the polls.
00:03:57
Speaker 1: All right, Matt Towery. But here's the problem, which brings us to your book, The Honoring of Ignorance, This Mirage Machine. What you're talking about is the media, the pollsters, academia, everything creating these mirages. Explain how the book came about.
00:04:13
Speaker 2: Oh, it's funny, Mark. I was a University of Georgia student. I dropped out to work for a guy named Newt Gingrich and another guy named Mack Mattingly. Gingrich was in his first term in Congress and Mattingly was running for the U.S. Senate. He got elected. I went to D.C. So I left Georgia and ended up at Cambridge University in England, which is where I took my degree. When I was there, I started working on a book called The Honoring of Ignorance. I got a literary agent, Ann Elmo, who's well-known. She's passed away since then. And they pitched the book to all these publishers. They all said, we love it, but he's too young to say this. And now I'm 67 years old, and I'm afraid people are going to say he's too old to say this. But it's still the same thesis. It's just changed a lot with the Internet and with cable television and all the things that have happened since 40 years ago. And we have one big mirage machine. It's basically we have a media that they exclude things. They make sure you don't see things that are possible about President Trump. They make sure they harp on the things that are negative. They then get the pollsters go out there and tell you, boy, he is so unpopular. And then they get the fact checkers who come and fact check them and say, oh, everything they're saying is right. Why did a fact check our polling company? And it was Snopes. And the woman wrote it. She said, we don't know anything about this polling firm, and we can't vouch for whether they're credible. You know that we polled for the Fox affiliates around the country, owned and operated for like eight, ten years, for Politico, for Newsmax, anybody you can think of. Yet somehow she couldn't find out anything about us, so she wrote this terrible review. Great fact checker, huh? Yeah.
00:05:53
Speaker 1: So here's the problem. Obviously, you got, you know, the universities are all left wing indoctrination camps. But then the news media goes total fake news. The fact checkers got totally corrupted. They're all left wing slanted people running these fact checking sites, which what you call the mirage machine. But what what on earth can you do about it? Is it too late?
00:06:18
Speaker 2: Well, there are two things. I say at the conclusion of the book that we're going to go one of two directions. We're either going to end up with a country where the blue states have compacts with one another and they have their own laws they follow and the red states do the same with their own states. Or we're going to learn as conservatives or Republicans, people just want to get the truth out, to start every week putting ads out to say in case you've missed it. And don't quote the conservative stuff by itself. Quote NBC News and CNN because they actually have to put up this good news of what Trump is doing, but they try to hide it. So instead of hiding it, get it out there so the public is not so ill-informed going into an election. That's the most critical thing, I think, advice I would give the Republicans and conservatives going into the future.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a great book. You should get this new book. It's called The Honoring of Ignorance. It's all about the mirage machine. It's Matt Towery, the honoring of ignorance. So if you're a young guy and you just got out of college, you've been totally indoctrinated into the left. You're watching left-wing crazy media, reading left-wing fact-checkers. Is that how it's now possible for really nutty candidates, Mamdani or El-Sayed, to be elected? Is that how that happened?
00:07:37
Speaker 2: That's exactly what has happened. We've had a whole generation of people who went to school where For example, with socialism, one of the reasons that the seniors are turning out like they are is because they remember the old Soviet Union. They know what Cuba was about. They saw the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. They're not taught about this stuff now, both in secondary schools and at universities. They're told a completely different story. So they have no idea about the truth. Now, that doesn't make these people stupid. It makes them ignorant. That's different. Ignorance means you just don't know. Doesn't mean you can't learn. So we've got to make sure that we teach people the truth and get the truth out there. In fact, get this book and go to Thanksgiving dinner where I know half the room is liberal and half is conservative. Nobody's talking to each other. Give them the book. Tell them to read it and see if they can come back and debate you the next week. I guarantee you they won't be able to beat you. You'll beat them.
00:08:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. So what do you do? How would you ever take back the universities? You'd have to get rid of the faculty, the board of trustees and even if you did, wouldn't it be generations before it helped?
00:08:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. And Mark, what has to happen is the late Charlie Kirk was a great example. You've got to go to these places and you've got to tell them the truth. And Charlie lost his life for doing that. But it was a, you know, a great life that he had. I had the pleasure of knowing him a bit, being on TV with him on Fox and But we need more people like him out there. And we also need to get, like I said, into the mainstream media. Conservative media is only 25% of what people watch. Most of the news they get is from Google and Apple and on social media. The conservatives have to get their story out on those platforms. And by the way, it would be a good idea if they created one or two fact-checkers that would check things right instead of the ones that pick on us all the time. I'm sure you get picked on. I know I do. And by the way, I'm retiring as a pollster, Mark. So I don't have, I have nothing to lose. This is my last year. All right.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Well, good luck with this. I don't know. It's going to take a million years to turn things around, but if you want to, you know, it's, it's doable.
00:09:52
Speaker 2: I live in the free state of Florida and this state, when I went to law school here was as democratic as it could be. I went back to Atlanta and, had a career there, came back home to Florida, and it's as Republican as can be, and they're changing the universities. They don't let them teach all this nonsense. It will happen. At some point, the truth and freedom end up winning.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody get this book. You're going to love this book. It's called The Honoring of Ignorance. about the Mirage Machine. It's Matt Towery's new book, The Honoring of Ignorance. Go to Amazon or wherever you get your books and get the book. Matt Towery, great stuff. Thanks for being with us.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Mark, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.
00:10:30
Speaker 1: All right, take care. Hey, don't forget, coming up at noon, Buck Sexton and Clay Travis, they do a great show every day, noon to three. Then at three o'clock, you got the most listened to radio show in America, Sean Hannity. You got Jesse Kelly at six. Every night at 9. You've got to start listening to this. It's a wonderful show. Jimmy Fallon, 9 to midnight. Very funny. Very, very smart show. 9 to midnight. Then, of course, I'm here. Three hours now. Three hours every day. 9 to noon. And before I come on, it's Curtis Sliwa and Larry Menti every morning. 6 to 9. That's all here on 710WOR.
