September 15, 2025 • 37 mins
Ryan breaks down fresh polling on Donald Trump’s favorability and why economic issues dominate voter concerns. He confronts the shockwaves from Charlie Kirk’s assassination, tracing America’s long history of political violence and warning of a surge in lone-wolf attacks. Ryan calls out toxic rhetoric, the dehumanization of opponents, and the dangers facing young conservatives in today’s climate. It's a Number Game is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome back to a numbers game with Ryan Gardusky. Happy Monday, everyone,
rise and grind I know we're late in the day,
so both you've already risen and grinded. I have new
polling numbers, which is always great way to start the week.
This poll comes from Beacon and Shaw. It was published
by Fox News. By the way, I'm going to start
talking about polls by who does them, not just the
(00:28):
company that produces and releases them, right, because Fox News
is the publisher, but they don't actually do the poll.
And people dismiss polls when they see certain media outlets
have published them, but that's not who does them. Beacon
and Shaw does the poll, and they're moderately good polster.
They're not the best in the business, but they're certainly
(00:49):
not the worst. So anyway, interesting numbers worth looking at.
The poll finds that Donald Trump has a forty six
percent favorability rating fifty four percent unfavorable right now. Now,
this poll does not include undecided I'm not a big
fan of poles that don't have undecided voters in them,
but forty six percent, nonetheless are is a decent number
(01:10):
for Trump. His best issues remain immigration, the border, and crime.
But Trump's worst issues are the cost of living, Russia, Ukraine, war, tariffs,
and the economy. I now remember what I told you
when we had our conversation about data centers. This was
last week or maybe the week prior. At this point,
I total the cost of living and energy bills and
(01:31):
food prices was becoming the main issue in the Virginia
and New Jersey governors races, and that could spread to
nationally as this issue continues to mount going into the
twenty twenty six midterms. Energy prices are only going to
go up as data centers are springing up throughout the country.
I said, the media has done a very good job
(01:52):
at framing the conversation around tariffs, but when we look
at things like food, yes we import certain food products
like bananas, for example, but we also grow a lot
of our own food and prices have risen as electricity
cost at grocery stores have also increased. According to the
Beacon Shaw poll released by Fox News, the economy is
(02:13):
the most important issue to voters' minds by like a mile. Right,
It's not even close. Forty percent almost forty percent say
that they had that the economy is number one. Immigration,
is a very very distant second with thirteen percent. Now,
the poll was taken from September sixth to September ninth,
obviously before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And while I
(02:36):
think the economy will remain the most important issue facing
voters certainly this November, the assassination is different than other
political events, the things that you know, people have made
issues of, but the media really has made an issue of.
But then you know, real voters never cared. They were
nothing Burgers, right. They like to harp on this for
(02:57):
ratings and retweets and clicks, things like the National Guard
in DC. People really didn't get up in arms, you know,
maybe outside of a few progressives in Washington, d C.
But it wasn't what people were talking about over the
kitchen table at dinner every night. Charlie's murder has had
a profound impact on people in a way that's not
(03:21):
not like these other events. Not just people who were
close to him or people like me who knew him.
But even though I wasn't particularly close to him, but
I knew him. I was at a wedding over the
weekend and it was mostly conservative people, but strangers who
I did not know, who I never met, were walking
up to me wanting to talk about Charlie. Now, obviously
(03:41):
I'm a pretty identifiable conservative person, especially if you've seen
some of my clips. But millions of people have started
following Charlie Kirks and his wife, Erica, and the Turning
Point in USA social media pages in the wake of
his murder. Yeshah Ali reported that Charlie Instagram has gained
(04:01):
more than five million new followers, Erica has gained four
point six million, and Turning Point USA has gained two
point two million. It's been wildly reported that more than
thirty two thousand requests have come in to Turning Point
to start new college chapters. That's wild. That's something different.
And then there's all the reports that people went to
(04:23):
church this week, and I know a few people, but
that's anecdotal. There's no been, no study or no hard
data to work that in. I do know a few
people who don't usually go to church who went to
church in this last weekend. But something feels different, and
not just among conservatives but people in general. I will
tell you I spoke to some very well known conservative
(04:44):
friends of mine, people who have large followings people who
are on television and have big social media handles, and
we talked about the feeling of being unsafe, which I
have felt for a while long before Charlie's murder. Conservative creators,
conservative commentators I did easily at Dentifoul, Conservative conservative politicians
(05:07):
who I've spoken to, feel like there's a target on
our back. I will say from my own personal experience
that I did a debate for Young Voices with Michael
Tracy a couple months ago after the New Year, and
it was my first experience since being canceled on CNN
that I did a public appearance, and I'm telling you,
I was very nervous. I kept on asking the organizers
(05:30):
about security, what's the state of our security, and they
all said was like, it's fine, don't worry. And when
I showed up, there was no security there, and it
turned out to be fine. Everything turned out to be okay.
But my concerns were real and they weren't taken seriously.
I knew how dangerous it was. I've not told people
(05:51):
about this, and I don't want to make a thing
out of it, but after my scene and appearance where
I made the beeper joke, I did not realize that
my personal Instagram, where I don't even post about politics
as dms, were open and I received in the night
that percept. The night after the scene en joke, when
I went to bed, I looked at my phone. Next day,
(06:12):
I had well over a thousand hateful messages sent to
me and many many death threats. People got a hold
of my phone number. Family members of my phone number
started calling and leavening threatening messages, harassing them. I ended
up right after that, you know. I walked my dog
(06:32):
the next day and someone random person screamed at me
in a park and said, you know, f CNN, and
they were taking my side. But it was very alarming
that someone identify me. I'm not I'm not someone who's
very famous, you know what I mean. I'm not somebody
who I'm not at Charlie's level, and I never was,
and I never pretend to be. Charlie had twenty times
(06:54):
the audience that I had on Twitter at the time
of his death, and I shaved my and I went
on a long extended vacation out of the country and
no one recognized me. And it took me a while,
and thankfully the election happened, and it went well, and
everyone kind of forgot. But I'll speak on behalf of
a lot of conservatives and say that the only difference
(07:15):
between Charlie and us is how big of a target
we have. It's not a question of if there's a target,
it's how big is it. It feels dangerous right now.
It feels concerning, and it got me thinking about political
assassinations and political violence. Over the weekend, I started reading
a book called Days of Rage, America's Underground, the FBI,
(07:39):
and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Brian Burrow.
It's a long book, so I'm not done with it yet,
but it talks with the nineteen sixties and seventies and
the turbulent decade in American history that I people have,
people including me, feel like we're kind of kind of there,
you know, we feel like we're there again. I'm only
(08:00):
five chapters in the book. I could say we're not
at the nineteen seventies level. According to Days of Rage,
America had dozens of progressive domestic terrorist groups seeking to
overthrow the government of the United States, And of course
there was really famous ones like the Weather or Underweather,
Underground and the Black Panthers, but there were a lot
of lesser known ones, the Sudanese Liberation Army, the Black
(08:23):
Liberation Army, United Freedom Front, the Puerto Rican Independence Army,
and the George Jackson Parade, and these groups were very
violent and they intended to overthrow the government. During an
eighteen month period from nineteen seventy one to nineteen seventy two,
there were twenty five hundred bombings domestic bombings in the
(08:47):
United States. Bombings happened so frequently, almost five per day
in the country that the media didn't even frequently publish
them unless people died. And thankfully, most of these times
so these bombings didn't result in death. Only one percent did.
The largest bombing only had four deaths, So it wasn't
(09:08):
It wasn't like we're seeing like mass shootings right where
a dozen people could die or or ten people could die,
and they often always result in deaths of some sort.
There was very few deaths related to these bombings, thankfully.
A man named Samuel Melville was the man who created
the style of bombing attacks used by the Weatherman Underground
(09:30):
and other leftist revolutionary groups. He was responsible for ten
bombings between July and November nineteen sixty nine, and he
later died in the attic of prison riots in nineteen
seventy one. There were other things that happened that I
had never even heard of, like in nineteen sixty one,
sixty Black Nationals stormed the United Nations General Council and
the incident led to dozens of injuries. There was also
(09:53):
the Zebra murders, where a black gang in San Francisco
was targeting and murdering white people. It was really violent,
more violent than people remember. I think what's interesting about
the book and comparing its circumstances then to what's happening now,
is as different and certainly less violent as it is now.
(10:13):
As far as the magnitude, we're not experiencing twenty five
hundred bombings in eighteen months. The roots of the problem
feel very similar. Like myself, a lot of people like
myself thought that the Vietnam War was the main actor
in this level of political violence, but it's actually very little.
(10:34):
According to the book, the Vietnam War was part of it,
but it was also almost affront by these revolutionary socialists
who wanted to overthrow the government. They were using it
as a grievance, but the main source of why they
were trying to overthrow the government was to combat racism.
Right they were talking about racism as the main central principle.
(10:59):
They wanted black authenticity of their struggle, which is very
funny coming from post BLM where race and identity was
the center point of a lot of left wing activists,
including by many many white people. Now. Granted, America was
a much more racist country back then. There was legitimate
acts of racism and laws against black people on the
(11:21):
books in parts of the country, especially the Deep South
at the time. That doesn't justify what they did, but
they had some legitimacy in their grievances. Those laws don't
exist today, even though some progressives act like they do,
and that level of racism doesn't exist today, even though
there's a perception promoted by the media that there is.
(11:43):
You see people like Jasmine Crockett talking about, you know,
ice agents looking like slaveholders. That's utter nonsense, and it's
a desecration of what actually happened. It doesn't matter though,
because the rhetoric is there. What's very interesting is that
the white ratic of the nineteen sixties and seventies were
as extreme as the black ones, But white radicals believed
(12:07):
that they could create a working class coalition around the
issue of race and like trying to promote like Maoism.
This mostly came out of the IVY leagues at the time,
and it was utterly rejected by working class Americans like
it is today. Most of these people, these radicals who
(12:29):
have attempted or have been successful in political violence, they're
coming out of college. These aren't, you know, blue collar
guys who work on cars. The decade of the nineteen
sixties and seventies was incredibly turbulent, and there was so
many politically motivated or you know, politically motivated assassinations. JFK, RFK,
(12:52):
Malcolm X, Martin, Luther King, Turk, Scott, George Muscone, Harvey Milk,
George Lincoln Rockwell. The last political journalist before Charlie who
was assassinated happened a decade later. It was in nineteen
eighty four. It was a radio host named Alan Berg
who was murdered by white supremacists who were antisemitic. I think,
(13:14):
right now, what's happening, and the place that we're in
is finger pointing. Right now, That's what we're doing. We
are fingerpointing to say who is really responsible, who is
responsible for the increase in violence, who's responsible for the Reddick,
and who is responsible for the violence that led to
(13:35):
Charlie's assassination. I want to talk about that and focus
on that next. So a lot of nonprofits like the
ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center have built lists
of hate groups or moditoring political violence. But those organizations
are not reliable sources at all. And I'm telling my
(13:57):
listeners if you see them being used as sources to
mostly ignore it. They are progressive institutions that look to
demonize Republicans and conservatives and occasionally sprinkle in a few
left wingers when it's extremely obvious that they're committing acts
of violence with a progressive cause. I looked at these databases.
(14:20):
I looked at what they were citing as violence and
not violence. In twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, there
was a ton of violence that sprang out of left
wing activists, the BLM riots and the subsequent anarchists groups
in places like Seattle. Remember chazz it was on autonomous
zone created by Anti Fund twenty twenty one. In Seattle,
(14:41):
there were many incidences of rape and assault and violence
and even murder at the CHAZ at the autonomous zone
created by left wing anarchists. But when I went through
the databases didn't list a single one of them. As
Minneapolis Police station being set on fire on May twenty eighth,
twenty twenty by BLM rioters not listened anywhere wasn't considered
(15:02):
an act of politically motivated violence. The University of Cincinnati
created a big database called the Prosecution Project to look
at felony criminal cases involving political violence during all of
twenty twenty, and I read through all their database through
twenty twenty, through the Summer of Love, where BLM writers
and ANTIFI activists were torching parts of this country. They
(15:22):
only had ten incidences of left wing violence. Two of
them were associated with BLM activists who had molotov cocktails.
Aside from that, nothing was listed. None of the most
obvious cases of left wing violence of that time were
included in any of this because under Activist DA's cases
(15:42):
were dropped. Right, they were looking at prosecutions, but there
was no prosecution in many of these cases, so they
weren't listening. But it doesn't mean it didn't happen. This
is the space that right wingers actually need to fill
if we're going to have this conversation. I spent a
lot of time trying to make my own assessment and
assortment of different information, and the information is incomplete. We
(16:06):
need real researchers to do this because otherwise, organizations that
promote progressive ideology get to create the narratives that the
media clombs onto and that non political people choose to
believe that the mainstream chooses to believe. Right the economists
reposted this data and it was completely not factual. Now
(16:30):
that's not to say that there have been no cases
of right wingers who have caused politically motivated attacks. I
don't want to get anyone confused or assume that I'm
blaming one side and forgiving all the other. Certainly, the
attack against Nancy Pelos's husband, Paul Pelosi, was committed by
a conspiracy minded right winger, and what happened to Paul
Pelosi was horrifying, It was tragic, and it should have
(16:53):
been wildly condemned and universally condemned, and instead was a
subject of mockery and conspiracy theories by mainstream conservatives. And
I'm going to call that out because I saw it
at the time and didn't like it, and now I
have a platform to site it. According to the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, one thing is clear. Politically
(17:14):
target attacks have become more partisan in nature and mostly
committed by loan wolves. It used to be the case,
especially in the nineties, that politically and going back to
the seventies, politically motivated attacks were predominantly caused by people
in affiliated organizations like Sovereign Citizens or right wing militias
(17:35):
or the weather I'm an underground or black nationalists, something
like that. That has given way to people who are
being radicalized online and motivated by partisan political beliefs and
acting as loan wolves. Many of the time that we've
seen in the last few years, in the last few
months and weeks, they are copycat killers. They're copycat attackers.
(17:59):
There are copy other famous attacks. There's no question in
my mind that the person who assassinated and murdered Charlie
Kirk copied Luig Mangiones murder of Brian Thompson based on
how they engraved the bullet casings. That's what happens with
a lot of crime. Copycat killers are very very common,
(18:21):
especially when the media amplifies these mass murderers. Remember, the
first person to copy the Columbine shooting was a man
named James Rossy, who did it eight days after Columbine
at his school in Canada. The first person to copy
in America was in twenty twenty one in California, and
that was when information was a lot slower. America was
(18:43):
much more easily shocked and fragile at these events. Since then,
school shootings from around the globe have copied Columbine, which
is the most infamous, though unfortunately not the most deadly
school shooting about all time. That's what I fear is
going to come out of Charlie Kirk's assassination is copycat killings,
especially that violence is increasingly being justified on the left.
(19:07):
A survey from Rutgers University found that twenty one percent
of respondents on the left believe that violence and murder
of Donald Trump is completely justified. Now, you may be saying,
one fit, that's not a majority, and no it's not.
It's not a majority. But when you're talking about millions
of people, a fifth is a lot of people who
(19:28):
could be radicalized, who don't have a moral compass, who
don't see someone's value and that they have a soul,
or that they were creating the image of God. They
don't see any of that. Look at how the left
has treated Luigi Mangioni. He's a cult hero to some
of them. They sell candles with his likeness as a
(19:49):
saint or is Jesus Christ pictured on it. I have
to tell you, I listen to a lot of progressive
podcasts way more than conservatives, mostly because I laugh at them.
I think that they're ridiculous, you know. I listen to
a bunch and I think that they're so unhinged and
what they say is not true. And I understand a
little bit of what their reasoning is from these listening episodes,
(20:13):
but it's mostly to laugh at them. But I've heard
a number of them say free Luigi, Team Luigi, and
you take a step back, and it's actually scary what
they're really saying, what they're really endorsing, especially when you
consider how they're speaking about Republicans and conservatives at large.
There is a dehumanization of the right going on in
(20:37):
this country. And look, I don't have the mouth of
a saint. I curse like a truck driver in my
personal life. I could make a sailor blush. I have
no filter. I'm not saying I'm perfect in this. Nonetheless,
when I use words like libtard, which I do use
pretty often, I'm not dehumanizing a liberal. I'm calling them stupid.
(20:58):
I'm not saying that they're the enemy. I used to
have actually an old political mentor named Tom Agnabenni who's
gone to his eternal rest and may rest in peace.
But he used to tell me when I was very young,
Democrats are not your enemies. They are your adversaries, but
they're your countrymen. They're not your enemies. And I remember
that to this day when I speak about people. But
(21:19):
what commenters are saying on the left is unjustifiable. Kamala
Harris said on seeing him that she believed Donald Trump
was a fascist. Congressman Slowwell made a reference to kicking
the shit out of fascism. AOC said that Trump was
a fascist that united racism, bigotry, and racist nationalism. Rachel
Maddow said on her show that we need to worry
(21:41):
about the rise of fascism. Congressman Goldman from New York
said he's trying that Trump was trying to roll over
this country as a fascist dictator. Senator Chris Murphy the
day before Charlie Kirk was murdered, said, we are at
war right now, and those are responsible left wingers who
have to answer to corporate you know, lawyers who have
(22:01):
to answer to sponsorships, who have to answer to voters.
George Conway, after Charlie was murdered, compared to him to
a young Nazi who was killed in Germany and then
uses propaganda Hassan Piker, who is a Twitch streamer, who's
a very famous Twitch streamer of the New York Times,
of this glowing puff piece about he said that we
(22:21):
need to kill those m efforts and let streets soak
in their red capitalist blood. There's a podcaster or you know, streamer,
whatever the hell called destiny. He said afterwards that conseratives
have to be afraid to get killed when they go
to events, and that says nothing about how the left
(22:43):
has said time and time again that the right is
guilty of genociding marginalized communities, that they are guilty of
supporting genocide in Gaza, that the people will die because
the big beautiful bill, or that the trans community is
being erased. Does my audience even know that currently active
right now, this is what the mainstream does not talk about.
(23:04):
Currently active right now is a transcult called the Zizians
that is responsible and connected to six murders. It's active today.
Many people are saying that there's a rise of transgender murders.
Steve Sailor looked this up and he found that wild
transgender people made up point six or transgender and non
(23:25):
binary people made up point six percent of the population.
They do have an overrepresentation of homicides of mass shootings
rather since twenty eighteen. While it certainly hasn't been studied enough,
there are string of mass murders committed by trans binary
people that the government needs to investigate, that the government
(23:48):
needs to come up with an official study of because
we don't have the data. There's a lot of rhetoric
on the right about this, but there's no I trust
me when I says I searched for hard numbers and
they're very, very difficult to come by, and we need
federal investigators to look this up because if it is
an issue, if it is a trend, it should be discussed.
(24:09):
This moment is not the first time that political rhetoric
around violence has been amplified to an unhealthy level. Remember
when Congressman Gabrielle Gifford's was shot by a schizophrenic without
a clear political ideology, he was, he had some right
wing tendencies, he had some left wing tendencies. He also
had saved a constituent letter that she had mailed to
(24:31):
him years prior that he became obsessed with. What did
the media blame? They blamed Sarah Palin, And I don't
want to get completely you know, I don't want to
admonish the right for saying that they've never spoken out
of a term, or that they never brought the dialogue
to an unhealthy level. During Obama's presidency, there were some
(24:52):
very popular right wingers that were comparing him to the Antichrist,
and that is not healthy. I don't want to excuse
that kind of language. This is different, though it is
being blanketed over all Trump supporters who The big difference
is that the right viewed Obama supporters more or less
(25:16):
as useful idiots, as young people who didn't experience life yet,
but they didn't like him. They had very, very demeaning
things to say about him. This is towards and by
the way. One last final point of that political violence
declined as Obama's presidency continued right for as vitriolic or
(25:37):
as unhinged or as unresponsible as the right was during
Obama's presidency, political violence declined over time. Political violence has
been increasing during Trump's presidency, both the first and then
in the post time, the four years between terms, and
now at this moment. The big difference is social media.
(26:02):
And it's not just TikTok or Instagram or memes. Right.
Thing is that people are posting about people trying to
get fired. People are trying to get other people fired
over what they've been saying about Charlie Kirk discord. Message boards,
anonymous groups like that are where people are going to
be increasingly radicalized. Twenty twenty five is slated to have
(26:24):
the most amount of death threats against elected officials ever recorded,
according to the Capitol Police is over fifteen thousand, and
this is not just confined to DC. According to Cornell University,
there are three hundred and ninety three counties with one
or more instances of political violence or attempted to political violence.
This is thirteen percent of all US counties. Additionally, only
(26:48):
six point one percent of all US counties had two
or more incidents of political violence, but two point seven
percent had more than five. That's a lot. That is
a lot. It seems like it's very little, but I
think of the overall where people live, and how many
people have in such few counties, it's almost impossible to
give political motivations behind all these attacks that are happening recently.
(27:14):
Right there are some the murder of Charlie Kirk Luigi,
the assault of Paul Pelosi. Some people are claiming the
murder of Minnesota legislators, but the man who murdered them
was clearly severely mentally ill. And I'm not saying that,
you know, Luigi isn't mentally ill. I'm saying, but severely
mentally ill. There are schizophrenics and people with severe mental
(27:35):
illness who are clamming on to the Internet and are
in the midst of social contagent who believe that political
violence is a force that gives them meaning. The left
is calling on this moment to regulate guns, and they
say that is the answer. They're kind of whitewashing Charlie's
murder as just being regular gun violence. But that's so
(27:58):
so disgusting and demeaning to who he was and what
happened to him and to the family he left behind.
Is not just pull it. It's just not gun violence
and gun regulations were much stronger than the nineteen seventies
when we had a lot more assaults. There's a problem
in the country. If they didn't have a gun, they'd
use a bomb. If they didn't have a bomb, they'd
(28:18):
use a knife, they would use something to assault people.
And I think that is important in this moment as
far as what we can do, what I can do,
what you can do is when the next Democrat, if
uses a conservative audience, which most of my audience is conservative,
when the next Democrat there will be a democratic president
(28:39):
you know at some point in history, or a left
wing president. Things swing back and forth. Not to lose
your mind, not to police your own language, maybe don't
share the thing that you know will get the most clicks,
and to really look at young people, especially young men
in your own family, and what they're looking at online.
(29:03):
Social media companies need to be held responsible for what
is happening. We need. Congress needs to change Section two thirty.
These are not just blanket publishers. They have to be
responsible over what people are sharing online. It is a
radicalization and there will be more copycat killers. And I say,
(29:27):
as somebody who received death threats in the last year alone,
and lots of threats in the last year, not just
death threats, but threats to my safety. Conservatives are going
to increase their reaction because the threat is real. And
(29:48):
I don't know what exactly is going to follow. I
don't know what laws will be changed, but something will happen,
and if there is another assault of another right winger,
the reaction will be more extreme. I think of even
just a week ago when Donald Trump and JD. Vans
and a bunch of the cabinet were in a restaurant
and protesters broke the door and started yelling, and they
(30:10):
were within feet of the president. It is genuinely scary.
What could happen if the wrong person was at that
place at the wrong time. People need to act more responsibly.
Cooler heads need to prevail, But social media companies need
to hold these people responsible. Who are radicalizing, who are dehumanizing,
(30:32):
who are using violent rhetoric. They need to be demonetized
and they need to be taken off social media. Free
speech is important, but you have to act responsive with it,
and these people are absolutely going to get some more
people killed if they continue like they are. That's my
little thing. Up next Ask Me Anything. Now, it's time
(30:55):
for Ask Me Anything. If you want a part of
the Ask Me Anything segment, please email me Ry at
Numbers gamepodcast dot com. That's Ryan at Numbers Game Plural
Numbers gamepodcast dot com. I want to remind my listeners
Thursday is a whole ask Me Anything podcast. I'm going
to do a lot of questions. I have a big
backlog and I'm gonna get everything and I possibly can,
(31:16):
so please email me. I love answering your questions. I
love hearing about everything. And by the way, thank you
all for the nice emails I got over the nine
to eleven segment. I know that came the same day
Charlie was murdered, and you know, nine to eleven kind
of fell in the back of everyone's mind. But I
really appreciate all the nice messages I received. My mom
really really thought the episode came out very well and
she was very proud of it, and I'm very proud
(31:37):
of it. So thank you all. It means the most
to me, So get your questions in let me know
what you want to do for podcast episodes in the future.
I love to talk about them Ryan at Numbers Game
podcast dot com. Okay, so this comes from Erica from Utah.
She's talking about the special election in Iowa. This is
the most recent special election where Republicans lost a double
digit Trump district and lost the republic looking super majority
(32:01):
in Iowa. She says, My understanding on the special election
in Iowa is that only about ten thousand people voted. Also,
the Democratic Party put thirty thousand volunteers on the ground
to win that election. Even with not knowing the amount
of money spent to win that seat, the math needing
five times number of voters, voters and volunteers can't be
translated into wins in other races. Okay, I understand what
(32:23):
you're saying, Erica. Yeah, the Democrats spent a lot of
money and a lot of time trying to win that seat.
If it was a one off election, I would agree
with you. Democrats have been overperforming in special elections on
an average of thirteen points in the last what is it,
seven months since the presidential election. That is a lot.
That is the most actually on record. Now part of
(32:45):
that not on record, but certainly in the last I
think six election cycle special election cycles. Part of that
is is that as political parties have changed, Democrats have
become an older party. They've all to become a party
that is more obsessed with the news and politics. You
could see that in a lot of polling right, in
(33:06):
a lot of polling data, there's an over representation of older,
left wing older Democrats. I'll give you a perfect example,
two perfect examples in Iowa. In the very famous poll
that came out right before the election, the Ann Salzer
poll where she predicted Kamala Harris who win Iowa. I
(33:28):
broke down that data in the cross stebs And and
Selter found that Kamala was going to win older white
women who are in who are large share or evangelical
in Iowa by double digits. Now, this was clearly nonsense, right,
anyone with a brain would have recognized that this is nonsense.
(33:50):
The problem is is that those older voters want to
answer a poll, they think about politics at an unhealthy
I don't say unhealthy, but at a level that is
high than the average person. Right. It is more than
just who do you vote for every two four years
or whatever special election is, it is a sport to them.
In the New York Times polling in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania,
(34:12):
why I assumed there was an error in their polling
is because those polls had Democrats at Kamala rather winning
senior citizens, especially white senior citizens, by double digits. I
think Michigan had had their winning by twenty points, in
Pennsylvania by ten points. If my memory serves me right,
that was never going to happen. But those people want
(34:35):
to answer the poll. They will call the pollster and say,
please let me answer the poll's That is what is
happening with these special elections. As far as voting as well.
People who are amplifying, you know, they amplify all their
political opinions. They can't wait to tell you how much
they hate Donald Trump. They vote in all these elections,
and as the Republican Party has become more has become
(34:56):
a larger share of non college educated voters, a larger
share of young voters, they don't vote in all these
special elections. So, yeah, did the Democrats spend a lot
of money? Do they send a lot of door knockers
to win this and to try to break the supermajority. Absolutely,
they did in this one district in Iowa, but they
have been winning across the board, even in places that
they haven't spent all that money or they've been overperforming
(35:20):
across the board. And a big part of that is
that high propensity voters with college degrees are increasingly just Democrats,
and it's something we need to recognize and we need
to figure out a way to make sure Republicans get
out and vote in greater frequency if we want to
win these elections, especially the midterms. Part of that answer,
(35:41):
and a lot of Republicans don't like that, but part
of the answer is we get these people who can't
be counted on to vote on election day. To vote early.
You have to use the tools ahead of you. You
have to color with every crayon in the box. Early
voting is part of that equation. Republicans don't like it,
but it is so until there is no early voting,
(36:01):
which there is and so there's no changing that. But
until there is changing that, but no one's proposing it
right now, No serious person's proposing it as far as
getting a legislator behind it and the governor sign it.
Until there is no early voting. You have to get
people to vote early, especially who you can't count on.
If it's raining, if the kid's crying, if someone's sick, whatever,
(36:22):
you need them to vote early. That's the point of
why I mentioned the Iowa election. It's more than Iowa.
It's happening in special elections everywhere. So hopefully it doesn't
happen for the November elections. Hopefully doesn't happen for the midterms.
Hopefully right wingers who are deeply, deeply impacted by Charlie
Kirk's assassination and want to continue his legacy, get active,
(36:45):
get motivated, and make sure Republicans win in November. That's
my episode today. I hope you enjoyed Ask Me Anything
all day Thursday. Please tune in, like, and subscribe on
this podcast and the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you
stream your podcast. Give me a five star review if
you so feel inclined, if you like the data I
bring you every week, and I will talk to you
guys on Thursday.
Welcome back to a numbers game with Ryan Gardusky. Happy Monday, everyone,
rise and grind I know we're late in the day,
so both you've already risen and grinded. I have new
polling numbers, which is always great way to start the week.
This poll comes from Beacon and Shaw. It was published
by Fox News. By the way, I'm going to start
talking about polls by who does them, not just the
(00:28):
company that produces and releases them, right, because Fox News
is the publisher, but they don't actually do the poll.
And people dismiss polls when they see certain media outlets
have published them, but that's not who does them. Beacon
and Shaw does the poll, and they're moderately good polster.
They're not the best in the business, but they're certainly
(00:49):
not the worst. So anyway, interesting numbers worth looking at.
The poll finds that Donald Trump has a forty six
percent favorability rating fifty four percent unfavorable right now. Now,
this poll does not include undecided I'm not a big
fan of poles that don't have undecided voters in them,
but forty six percent, nonetheless are is a decent number
(01:10):
for Trump. His best issues remain immigration, the border, and crime.
But Trump's worst issues are the cost of living, Russia, Ukraine, war, tariffs,
and the economy. I now remember what I told you
when we had our conversation about data centers. This was
last week or maybe the week prior. At this point,
I total the cost of living and energy bills and
(01:31):
food prices was becoming the main issue in the Virginia
and New Jersey governors races, and that could spread to
nationally as this issue continues to mount going into the
twenty twenty six midterms. Energy prices are only going to
go up as data centers are springing up throughout the country.
I said, the media has done a very good job
(01:52):
at framing the conversation around tariffs, but when we look
at things like food, yes we import certain food products
like bananas, for example, but we also grow a lot
of our own food and prices have risen as electricity
cost at grocery stores have also increased. According to the
Beacon Shaw poll released by Fox News, the economy is
(02:13):
the most important issue to voters' minds by like a mile. Right,
It's not even close. Forty percent almost forty percent say
that they had that the economy is number one. Immigration,
is a very very distant second with thirteen percent. Now,
the poll was taken from September sixth to September ninth,
obviously before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And while I
(02:36):
think the economy will remain the most important issue facing
voters certainly this November, the assassination is different than other
political events, the things that you know, people have made
issues of, but the media really has made an issue of.
But then you know, real voters never cared. They were
nothing Burgers, right. They like to harp on this for
(02:57):
ratings and retweets and clicks, things like the National Guard
in DC. People really didn't get up in arms, you know,
maybe outside of a few progressives in Washington, d C.
But it wasn't what people were talking about over the
kitchen table at dinner every night. Charlie's murder has had
a profound impact on people in a way that's not
(03:21):
not like these other events. Not just people who were
close to him or people like me who knew him.
But even though I wasn't particularly close to him, but
I knew him. I was at a wedding over the
weekend and it was mostly conservative people, but strangers who
I did not know, who I never met, were walking
up to me wanting to talk about Charlie. Now, obviously
(03:41):
I'm a pretty identifiable conservative person, especially if you've seen
some of my clips. But millions of people have started
following Charlie Kirks and his wife, Erica, and the Turning
Point in USA social media pages in the wake of
his murder. Yeshah Ali reported that Charlie Instagram has gained
(04:01):
more than five million new followers, Erica has gained four
point six million, and Turning Point USA has gained two
point two million. It's been wildly reported that more than
thirty two thousand requests have come in to Turning Point
to start new college chapters. That's wild. That's something different.
And then there's all the reports that people went to
(04:23):
church this week, and I know a few people, but
that's anecdotal. There's no been, no study or no hard
data to work that in. I do know a few
people who don't usually go to church who went to
church in this last weekend. But something feels different, and
not just among conservatives but people in general. I will
tell you I spoke to some very well known conservative
(04:44):
friends of mine, people who have large followings people who
are on television and have big social media handles, and
we talked about the feeling of being unsafe, which I
have felt for a while long before Charlie's murder. Conservative creators,
conservative commentators I did easily at Dentifoul, Conservative conservative politicians
(05:07):
who I've spoken to, feel like there's a target on
our back. I will say from my own personal experience
that I did a debate for Young Voices with Michael
Tracy a couple months ago after the New Year, and
it was my first experience since being canceled on CNN
that I did a public appearance, and I'm telling you,
I was very nervous. I kept on asking the organizers
(05:30):
about security, what's the state of our security, and they
all said was like, it's fine, don't worry. And when
I showed up, there was no security there, and it
turned out to be fine. Everything turned out to be okay.
But my concerns were real and they weren't taken seriously.
I knew how dangerous it was. I've not told people
(05:51):
about this, and I don't want to make a thing
out of it, but after my scene and appearance where
I made the beeper joke, I did not realize that
my personal Instagram, where I don't even post about politics
as dms, were open and I received in the night
that percept. The night after the scene en joke, when
I went to bed, I looked at my phone. Next day,
(06:12):
I had well over a thousand hateful messages sent to
me and many many death threats. People got a hold
of my phone number. Family members of my phone number
started calling and leavening threatening messages, harassing them. I ended
up right after that, you know. I walked my dog
(06:32):
the next day and someone random person screamed at me
in a park and said, you know, f CNN, and
they were taking my side. But it was very alarming
that someone identify me. I'm not I'm not someone who's
very famous, you know what I mean. I'm not somebody
who I'm not at Charlie's level, and I never was,
and I never pretend to be. Charlie had twenty times
(06:54):
the audience that I had on Twitter at the time
of his death, and I shaved my and I went
on a long extended vacation out of the country and
no one recognized me. And it took me a while,
and thankfully the election happened, and it went well, and
everyone kind of forgot. But I'll speak on behalf of
a lot of conservatives and say that the only difference
(07:15):
between Charlie and us is how big of a target
we have. It's not a question of if there's a target,
it's how big is it. It feels dangerous right now.
It feels concerning, and it got me thinking about political
assassinations and political violence. Over the weekend, I started reading
a book called Days of Rage, America's Underground, the FBI,
(07:39):
and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Brian Burrow.
It's a long book, so I'm not done with it yet,
but it talks with the nineteen sixties and seventies and
the turbulent decade in American history that I people have,
people including me, feel like we're kind of kind of there,
you know, we feel like we're there again. I'm only
(08:00):
five chapters in the book. I could say we're not
at the nineteen seventies level. According to Days of Rage,
America had dozens of progressive domestic terrorist groups seeking to
overthrow the government of the United States, And of course
there was really famous ones like the Weather or Underweather,
Underground and the Black Panthers, but there were a lot
of lesser known ones, the Sudanese Liberation Army, the Black
(08:23):
Liberation Army, United Freedom Front, the Puerto Rican Independence Army,
and the George Jackson Parade, and these groups were very
violent and they intended to overthrow the government. During an
eighteen month period from nineteen seventy one to nineteen seventy two,
there were twenty five hundred bombings domestic bombings in the
(08:47):
United States. Bombings happened so frequently, almost five per day
in the country that the media didn't even frequently publish
them unless people died. And thankfully, most of these times
so these bombings didn't result in death. Only one percent did.
The largest bombing only had four deaths, So it wasn't
(09:08):
It wasn't like we're seeing like mass shootings right where
a dozen people could die or or ten people could die,
and they often always result in deaths of some sort.
There was very few deaths related to these bombings, thankfully.
A man named Samuel Melville was the man who created
the style of bombing attacks used by the Weatherman Underground
(09:30):
and other leftist revolutionary groups. He was responsible for ten
bombings between July and November nineteen sixty nine, and he
later died in the attic of prison riots in nineteen
seventy one. There were other things that happened that I
had never even heard of, like in nineteen sixty one,
sixty Black Nationals stormed the United Nations General Council and
the incident led to dozens of injuries. There was also
(09:53):
the Zebra murders, where a black gang in San Francisco
was targeting and murdering white people. It was really violent,
more violent than people remember. I think what's interesting about
the book and comparing its circumstances then to what's happening now,
is as different and certainly less violent as it is now.
(10:13):
As far as the magnitude, we're not experiencing twenty five
hundred bombings in eighteen months. The roots of the problem
feel very similar. Like myself, a lot of people like
myself thought that the Vietnam War was the main actor
in this level of political violence, but it's actually very little.
(10:34):
According to the book, the Vietnam War was part of it,
but it was also almost affront by these revolutionary socialists
who wanted to overthrow the government. They were using it
as a grievance, but the main source of why they
were trying to overthrow the government was to combat racism.
Right they were talking about racism as the main central principle.
(10:59):
They wanted black authenticity of their struggle, which is very
funny coming from post BLM where race and identity was
the center point of a lot of left wing activists,
including by many many white people. Now. Granted, America was
a much more racist country back then. There was legitimate
acts of racism and laws against black people on the
(11:21):
books in parts of the country, especially the Deep South
at the time. That doesn't justify what they did, but
they had some legitimacy in their grievances. Those laws don't
exist today, even though some progressives act like they do,
and that level of racism doesn't exist today, even though
there's a perception promoted by the media that there is.
(11:43):
You see people like Jasmine Crockett talking about, you know,
ice agents looking like slaveholders. That's utter nonsense, and it's
a desecration of what actually happened. It doesn't matter though,
because the rhetoric is there. What's very interesting is that
the white ratic of the nineteen sixties and seventies were
as extreme as the black ones, But white radicals believed
(12:07):
that they could create a working class coalition around the
issue of race and like trying to promote like Maoism.
This mostly came out of the IVY leagues at the time,
and it was utterly rejected by working class Americans like
it is today. Most of these people, these radicals who
(12:29):
have attempted or have been successful in political violence, they're
coming out of college. These aren't, you know, blue collar
guys who work on cars. The decade of the nineteen
sixties and seventies was incredibly turbulent, and there was so
many politically motivated or you know, politically motivated assassinations. JFK, RFK,
(12:52):
Malcolm X, Martin, Luther King, Turk, Scott, George Muscone, Harvey Milk,
George Lincoln Rockwell. The last political journalist before Charlie who
was assassinated happened a decade later. It was in nineteen
eighty four. It was a radio host named Alan Berg
who was murdered by white supremacists who were antisemitic. I think,
(13:14):
right now, what's happening, and the place that we're in
is finger pointing. Right now, That's what we're doing. We
are fingerpointing to say who is really responsible, who is
responsible for the increase in violence, who's responsible for the Reddick,
and who is responsible for the violence that led to
(13:35):
Charlie's assassination. I want to talk about that and focus
on that next. So a lot of nonprofits like the
ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center have built lists
of hate groups or moditoring political violence. But those organizations
are not reliable sources at all. And I'm telling my
(13:57):
listeners if you see them being used as sources to
mostly ignore it. They are progressive institutions that look to
demonize Republicans and conservatives and occasionally sprinkle in a few
left wingers when it's extremely obvious that they're committing acts
of violence with a progressive cause. I looked at these databases.
(14:20):
I looked at what they were citing as violence and
not violence. In twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, there
was a ton of violence that sprang out of left
wing activists, the BLM riots and the subsequent anarchists groups
in places like Seattle. Remember chazz it was on autonomous
zone created by Anti Fund twenty twenty one. In Seattle,
(14:41):
there were many incidences of rape and assault and violence
and even murder at the CHAZ at the autonomous zone
created by left wing anarchists. But when I went through
the databases didn't list a single one of them. As
Minneapolis Police station being set on fire on May twenty eighth,
twenty twenty by BLM rioters not listened anywhere wasn't considered
(15:02):
an act of politically motivated violence. The University of Cincinnati
created a big database called the Prosecution Project to look
at felony criminal cases involving political violence during all of
twenty twenty, and I read through all their database through
twenty twenty, through the Summer of Love, where BLM writers
and ANTIFI activists were torching parts of this country. They
(15:22):
only had ten incidences of left wing violence. Two of
them were associated with BLM activists who had molotov cocktails.
Aside from that, nothing was listed. None of the most
obvious cases of left wing violence of that time were
included in any of this because under Activist DA's cases
(15:42):
were dropped. Right, they were looking at prosecutions, but there
was no prosecution in many of these cases, so they
weren't listening. But it doesn't mean it didn't happen. This
is the space that right wingers actually need to fill
if we're going to have this conversation. I spent a
lot of time trying to make my own assessment and
assortment of different information, and the information is incomplete. We
(16:06):
need real researchers to do this because otherwise, organizations that
promote progressive ideology get to create the narratives that the
media clombs onto and that non political people choose to
believe that the mainstream chooses to believe. Right the economists
reposted this data and it was completely not factual. Now
(16:30):
that's not to say that there have been no cases
of right wingers who have caused politically motivated attacks. I
don't want to get anyone confused or assume that I'm
blaming one side and forgiving all the other. Certainly, the
attack against Nancy Pelos's husband, Paul Pelosi, was committed by
a conspiracy minded right winger, and what happened to Paul
Pelosi was horrifying, It was tragic, and it should have
(16:53):
been wildly condemned and universally condemned, and instead was a
subject of mockery and conspiracy theories by mainstream conservatives. And
I'm going to call that out because I saw it
at the time and didn't like it, and now I
have a platform to site it. According to the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, one thing is clear. Politically
(17:14):
target attacks have become more partisan in nature and mostly
committed by loan wolves. It used to be the case,
especially in the nineties, that politically and going back to
the seventies, politically motivated attacks were predominantly caused by people
in affiliated organizations like Sovereign Citizens or right wing militias
(17:35):
or the weather I'm an underground or black nationalists, something
like that. That has given way to people who are
being radicalized online and motivated by partisan political beliefs and
acting as loan wolves. Many of the time that we've
seen in the last few years, in the last few
months and weeks, they are copycat killers. They're copycat attackers.
(17:59):
There are copy other famous attacks. There's no question in
my mind that the person who assassinated and murdered Charlie
Kirk copied Luig Mangiones murder of Brian Thompson based on
how they engraved the bullet casings. That's what happens with
a lot of crime. Copycat killers are very very common,
(18:21):
especially when the media amplifies these mass murderers. Remember, the
first person to copy the Columbine shooting was a man
named James Rossy, who did it eight days after Columbine
at his school in Canada. The first person to copy
in America was in twenty twenty one in California, and
that was when information was a lot slower. America was
(18:43):
much more easily shocked and fragile at these events. Since then,
school shootings from around the globe have copied Columbine, which
is the most infamous, though unfortunately not the most deadly
school shooting about all time. That's what I fear is
going to come out of Charlie Kirk's assassination is copycat killings,
especially that violence is increasingly being justified on the left.
(19:07):
A survey from Rutgers University found that twenty one percent
of respondents on the left believe that violence and murder
of Donald Trump is completely justified. Now, you may be saying,
one fit, that's not a majority, and no it's not.
It's not a majority. But when you're talking about millions
of people, a fifth is a lot of people who
(19:28):
could be radicalized, who don't have a moral compass, who
don't see someone's value and that they have a soul,
or that they were creating the image of God. They
don't see any of that. Look at how the left
has treated Luigi Mangioni. He's a cult hero to some
of them. They sell candles with his likeness as a
(19:49):
saint or is Jesus Christ pictured on it. I have
to tell you, I listen to a lot of progressive
podcasts way more than conservatives, mostly because I laugh at them.
I think that they're ridiculous, you know. I listen to
a bunch and I think that they're so unhinged and
what they say is not true. And I understand a
little bit of what their reasoning is from these listening episodes,
(20:13):
but it's mostly to laugh at them. But I've heard
a number of them say free Luigi, Team Luigi, and
you take a step back, and it's actually scary what
they're really saying, what they're really endorsing, especially when you
consider how they're speaking about Republicans and conservatives at large.
There is a dehumanization of the right going on in
(20:37):
this country. And look, I don't have the mouth of
a saint. I curse like a truck driver in my
personal life. I could make a sailor blush. I have
no filter. I'm not saying I'm perfect in this. Nonetheless,
when I use words like libtard, which I do use
pretty often, I'm not dehumanizing a liberal. I'm calling them stupid.
(20:58):
I'm not saying that they're the enemy. I used to
have actually an old political mentor named Tom Agnabenni who's
gone to his eternal rest and may rest in peace.
But he used to tell me when I was very young,
Democrats are not your enemies. They are your adversaries, but
they're your countrymen. They're not your enemies. And I remember
that to this day when I speak about people. But
(21:19):
what commenters are saying on the left is unjustifiable. Kamala
Harris said on seeing him that she believed Donald Trump
was a fascist. Congressman Slowwell made a reference to kicking
the shit out of fascism. AOC said that Trump was
a fascist that united racism, bigotry, and racist nationalism. Rachel
Maddow said on her show that we need to worry
(21:41):
about the rise of fascism. Congressman Goldman from New York
said he's trying that Trump was trying to roll over
this country as a fascist dictator. Senator Chris Murphy the
day before Charlie Kirk was murdered, said, we are at
war right now, and those are responsible left wingers who
have to answer to corporate you know, lawyers who have
(22:01):
to answer to sponsorships, who have to answer to voters.
George Conway, after Charlie was murdered, compared to him to
a young Nazi who was killed in Germany and then
uses propaganda Hassan Piker, who is a Twitch streamer, who's
a very famous Twitch streamer of the New York Times,
of this glowing puff piece about he said that we
(22:21):
need to kill those m efforts and let streets soak
in their red capitalist blood. There's a podcaster or you know, streamer,
whatever the hell called destiny. He said afterwards that conseratives
have to be afraid to get killed when they go
to events, and that says nothing about how the left
(22:43):
has said time and time again that the right is
guilty of genociding marginalized communities, that they are guilty of
supporting genocide in Gaza, that the people will die because
the big beautiful bill, or that the trans community is
being erased. Does my audience even know that currently active
right now, this is what the mainstream does not talk about.
(23:04):
Currently active right now is a transcult called the Zizians
that is responsible and connected to six murders. It's active today.
Many people are saying that there's a rise of transgender murders.
Steve Sailor looked this up and he found that wild
transgender people made up point six or transgender and non
(23:25):
binary people made up point six percent of the population.
They do have an overrepresentation of homicides of mass shootings
rather since twenty eighteen. While it certainly hasn't been studied enough,
there are string of mass murders committed by trans binary
people that the government needs to investigate, that the government
(23:48):
needs to come up with an official study of because
we don't have the data. There's a lot of rhetoric
on the right about this, but there's no I trust
me when I says I searched for hard numbers and
they're very, very difficult to come by, and we need
federal investigators to look this up because if it is
an issue, if it is a trend, it should be discussed.
(24:09):
This moment is not the first time that political rhetoric
around violence has been amplified to an unhealthy level. Remember
when Congressman Gabrielle Gifford's was shot by a schizophrenic without
a clear political ideology, he was, he had some right
wing tendencies, he had some left wing tendencies. He also
had saved a constituent letter that she had mailed to
(24:31):
him years prior that he became obsessed with. What did
the media blame? They blamed Sarah Palin, And I don't
want to get completely you know, I don't want to
admonish the right for saying that they've never spoken out
of a term, or that they never brought the dialogue
to an unhealthy level. During Obama's presidency, there were some
(24:52):
very popular right wingers that were comparing him to the Antichrist,
and that is not healthy. I don't want to excuse
that kind of language. This is different, though it is
being blanketed over all Trump supporters who The big difference
is that the right viewed Obama supporters more or less
(25:16):
as useful idiots, as young people who didn't experience life yet,
but they didn't like him. They had very, very demeaning
things to say about him. This is towards and by
the way. One last final point of that political violence
declined as Obama's presidency continued right for as vitriolic or
(25:37):
as unhinged or as unresponsible as the right was during
Obama's presidency, political violence declined over time. Political violence has
been increasing during Trump's presidency, both the first and then
in the post time, the four years between terms, and
now at this moment. The big difference is social media.
(26:02):
And it's not just TikTok or Instagram or memes. Right.
Thing is that people are posting about people trying to
get fired. People are trying to get other people fired
over what they've been saying about Charlie Kirk discord. Message boards,
anonymous groups like that are where people are going to
be increasingly radicalized. Twenty twenty five is slated to have
(26:24):
the most amount of death threats against elected officials ever recorded,
according to the Capitol Police is over fifteen thousand, and
this is not just confined to DC. According to Cornell University,
there are three hundred and ninety three counties with one
or more instances of political violence or attempted to political violence.
This is thirteen percent of all US counties. Additionally, only
(26:48):
six point one percent of all US counties had two
or more incidents of political violence, but two point seven
percent had more than five. That's a lot. That is
a lot. It seems like it's very little, but I
think of the overall where people live, and how many
people have in such few counties, it's almost impossible to
give political motivations behind all these attacks that are happening recently.
(27:14):
Right there are some the murder of Charlie Kirk Luigi,
the assault of Paul Pelosi. Some people are claiming the
murder of Minnesota legislators, but the man who murdered them
was clearly severely mentally ill. And I'm not saying that,
you know, Luigi isn't mentally ill. I'm saying, but severely
mentally ill. There are schizophrenics and people with severe mental
(27:35):
illness who are clamming on to the Internet and are
in the midst of social contagent who believe that political
violence is a force that gives them meaning. The left
is calling on this moment to regulate guns, and they
say that is the answer. They're kind of whitewashing Charlie's
murder as just being regular gun violence. But that's so
(27:58):
so disgusting and demeaning to who he was and what
happened to him and to the family he left behind.
Is not just pull it. It's just not gun violence
and gun regulations were much stronger than the nineteen seventies
when we had a lot more assaults. There's a problem
in the country. If they didn't have a gun, they'd
use a bomb. If they didn't have a bomb, they'd
(28:18):
use a knife, they would use something to assault people.
And I think that is important in this moment as
far as what we can do, what I can do,
what you can do is when the next Democrat, if
uses a conservative audience, which most of my audience is conservative,
when the next Democrat there will be a democratic president
(28:39):
you know at some point in history, or a left
wing president. Things swing back and forth. Not to lose
your mind, not to police your own language, maybe don't
share the thing that you know will get the most clicks,
and to really look at young people, especially young men
in your own family, and what they're looking at online.
(29:03):
Social media companies need to be held responsible for what
is happening. We need. Congress needs to change Section two thirty.
These are not just blanket publishers. They have to be
responsible over what people are sharing online. It is a
radicalization and there will be more copycat killers. And I say,
(29:27):
as somebody who received death threats in the last year alone,
and lots of threats in the last year, not just
death threats, but threats to my safety. Conservatives are going
to increase their reaction because the threat is real. And
(29:48):
I don't know what exactly is going to follow. I
don't know what laws will be changed, but something will happen,
and if there is another assault of another right winger,
the reaction will be more extreme. I think of even
just a week ago when Donald Trump and JD. Vans
and a bunch of the cabinet were in a restaurant
and protesters broke the door and started yelling, and they
(30:10):
were within feet of the president. It is genuinely scary.
What could happen if the wrong person was at that
place at the wrong time. People need to act more responsibly.
Cooler heads need to prevail, But social media companies need
to hold these people responsible. Who are radicalizing, who are dehumanizing,
(30:32):
who are using violent rhetoric. They need to be demonetized
and they need to be taken off social media. Free
speech is important, but you have to act responsive with it,
and these people are absolutely going to get some more
people killed if they continue like they are. That's my
little thing. Up next Ask Me Anything. Now, it's time
(30:55):
for Ask Me Anything. If you want a part of
the Ask Me Anything segment, please email me Ry at
Numbers gamepodcast dot com. That's Ryan at Numbers Game Plural
Numbers gamepodcast dot com. I want to remind my listeners
Thursday is a whole ask Me Anything podcast. I'm going
to do a lot of questions. I have a big
backlog and I'm gonna get everything and I possibly can,
(31:16):
so please email me. I love answering your questions. I
love hearing about everything. And by the way, thank you
all for the nice emails I got over the nine
to eleven segment. I know that came the same day
Charlie was murdered, and you know, nine to eleven kind
of fell in the back of everyone's mind. But I
really appreciate all the nice messages I received. My mom
really really thought the episode came out very well and
she was very proud of it, and I'm very proud
(31:37):
of it. So thank you all. It means the most
to me, So get your questions in let me know
what you want to do for podcast episodes in the future.
I love to talk about them Ryan at Numbers Game
podcast dot com. Okay, so this comes from Erica from Utah.
She's talking about the special election in Iowa. This is
the most recent special election where Republicans lost a double
digit Trump district and lost the republic looking super majority
(32:01):
in Iowa. She says, My understanding on the special election
in Iowa is that only about ten thousand people voted. Also,
the Democratic Party put thirty thousand volunteers on the ground
to win that election. Even with not knowing the amount
of money spent to win that seat, the math needing
five times number of voters, voters and volunteers can't be
translated into wins in other races. Okay, I understand what
(32:23):
you're saying, Erica. Yeah, the Democrats spent a lot of
money and a lot of time trying to win that seat.
If it was a one off election, I would agree
with you. Democrats have been overperforming in special elections on
an average of thirteen points in the last what is it,
seven months since the presidential election. That is a lot.
That is the most actually on record. Now part of
(32:45):
that not on record, but certainly in the last I
think six election cycle special election cycles. Part of that
is is that as political parties have changed, Democrats have
become an older party. They've all to become a party
that is more obsessed with the news and politics. You
could see that in a lot of polling right, in
(33:06):
a lot of polling data, there's an over representation of older,
left wing older Democrats. I'll give you a perfect example,
two perfect examples in Iowa. In the very famous poll
that came out right before the election, the Ann Salzer
poll where she predicted Kamala Harris who win Iowa. I
(33:28):
broke down that data in the cross stebs And and
Selter found that Kamala was going to win older white
women who are in who are large share or evangelical
in Iowa by double digits. Now, this was clearly nonsense, right,
anyone with a brain would have recognized that this is nonsense.
(33:50):
The problem is is that those older voters want to
answer a poll, they think about politics at an unhealthy
I don't say unhealthy, but at a level that is
high than the average person. Right. It is more than
just who do you vote for every two four years
or whatever special election is, it is a sport to them.
In the New York Times polling in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania,
(34:12):
why I assumed there was an error in their polling
is because those polls had Democrats at Kamala rather winning
senior citizens, especially white senior citizens, by double digits. I
think Michigan had had their winning by twenty points, in
Pennsylvania by ten points. If my memory serves me right,
that was never going to happen. But those people want
(34:35):
to answer the poll. They will call the pollster and say,
please let me answer the poll's That is what is
happening with these special elections. As far as voting as well.
People who are amplifying, you know, they amplify all their
political opinions. They can't wait to tell you how much
they hate Donald Trump. They vote in all these elections,
and as the Republican Party has become more has become
(34:56):
a larger share of non college educated voters, a larger
share of young voters, they don't vote in all these
special elections. So, yeah, did the Democrats spend a lot
of money? Do they send a lot of door knockers
to win this and to try to break the supermajority. Absolutely,
they did in this one district in Iowa, but they
have been winning across the board, even in places that
they haven't spent all that money or they've been overperforming
(35:20):
across the board. And a big part of that is
that high propensity voters with college degrees are increasingly just Democrats,
and it's something we need to recognize and we need
to figure out a way to make sure Republicans get
out and vote in greater frequency if we want to
win these elections, especially the midterms. Part of that answer,
(35:41):
and a lot of Republicans don't like that, but part
of the answer is we get these people who can't
be counted on to vote on election day. To vote early.
You have to use the tools ahead of you. You
have to color with every crayon in the box. Early
voting is part of that equation. Republicans don't like it,
but it is so until there is no early voting,
(36:01):
which there is and so there's no changing that. But
until there is changing that, but no one's proposing it
right now, No serious person's proposing it as far as
getting a legislator behind it and the governor sign it.
Until there is no early voting. You have to get
people to vote early, especially who you can't count on.
If it's raining, if the kid's crying, if someone's sick, whatever,
(36:22):
you need them to vote early. That's the point of
why I mentioned the Iowa election. It's more than Iowa.
It's happening in special elections everywhere. So hopefully it doesn't
happen for the November elections. Hopefully doesn't happen for the midterms.
Hopefully right wingers who are deeply, deeply impacted by Charlie
Kirk's assassination and want to continue his legacy, get active,
(36:45):
get motivated, and make sure Republicans win in November. That's
my episode today. I hope you enjoyed Ask Me Anything
all day Thursday. Please tune in, like, and subscribe on
this podcast and the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you
stream your podcast. Give me a five star review if
you so feel inclined, if you like the data I
bring you every week, and I will talk to you
guys on Thursday.
Host
Gill Alexander
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