The Culture War - Tim Pool - March 14, 2026


Trump Endorsing CORNYN, Texas Is Going BLUE ft. Tony Ortiz


Episode Stats

Length

34 minutes

Words per Minute

204.71077

Word Count

7,092

Sentence Count

266

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

18


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Tony Gonzalez of Current Revolt joins me to talk about the latest election drama in Texas, including the Cornyn vs Paxton race, the Beto Beto vs. Cornyn primary, and why Ted Cruz is the favorite to win the primary.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:45.200 Tony, thank you very much for joining.
00:00:47.060 I'm very happy to have you on today.
00:00:48.520 For the people who don't know who you are, the five people out there,
00:00:51.100 could you give a quick intro of who you are and what you do?
00:00:53.460 Yeah, I run Current Revolt.
00:00:54.600 We're a Texas-based media outlet that specifically covers just Texas-based news.
00:00:59.760 So things like affairs and scandals and just inter-party happenings within Texas, all of that is on our website.
00:01:06.540 I love that.
00:01:07.040 I love that.
00:01:07.300 Well, I had to bring you in because this story – well, it's many stories nested within one story.
00:01:14.080 It's obviously all the election drama in Texas, and obviously this is going to be your ballpark.
00:01:19.580 I wanted to lead with the big one.
00:01:20.840 Obviously, this is the one that everyone's talking about is the Cornyn versus Paxton race.
00:01:23.820 There's a lot of moving parts here.
00:01:26.100 The interesting thing I think everyone's pointing out is Trump has had this problem for the
00:01:30.200 longest time in which he seems to not look into who he's endorsing or he just endorses
00:01:35.740 just obviously guys that hate him.
00:01:39.940 I think there's really no other way to put it.
00:01:41.560 And this seems like to be another case where Paxton obviously seems to be the MAGA favorite,
00:01:47.280 obviously the base is behind him.
00:01:50.240 He's great on policies, you know, loyal, Trump loyalist, I would say.
00:01:53.820 And then Cornyn gets the nod over him. Could you maybe give us some of the inside baseball into why this is happening? And maybe specifically from the Texan point of view, why Cornyn has such an unfavorable view among Texans?
00:02:05.860 yeah there's probably two reasons right uh that you can speculate on one is the biggest one which
00:02:11.460 is democrats also view paxton as the least likely to win against talarico talarico james talarico
00:02:18.860 is the nominee for texas senate for the democrats right and polling is consistently shown and this
00:02:24.720 is all polling is consistently shown that when it's a paxton ken paxton versus james talarico
00:02:30.400 matchup ken paxton performs the worst versus compared to like a john cornyn right so not only
00:02:36.580 are like conservatives and like right-wing people supporting ken paxton but democrats want ken paxton
00:02:42.320 to win right they view him as the weaker one so maybe trump sees maybe the long-term game on this
00:02:47.460 right and the risk associated with that race uh and then additionally you know cornyn is currently
00:02:52.880 the nominee he's the you know sorry the incumbent and it could be a situation where the votes are
00:02:59.760 really tight right now. We don't have enough of a majority to get what we want done in Congress
00:03:04.560 and in the Senate. And Trump really needs that Cornyn support to get certain things passed.
00:03:11.060 That makes that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because Trump, obviously, I think in his he
00:03:15.120 hasn't endorsed Volblow and endorsed Cornyn, if I'm correct, but he basically says something along
00:03:18.740 the lines of like, I endorse people with a winning record. And he's basically saying he's going to
00:03:23.280 endorse the incumbent. I mean, for like a better word, you could read between the lines a little
00:03:26.160 bit. And I imagine that endorsement would be coming soon. To your point, I mean, that's a bit
00:03:32.440 alarming, I would say, for the Texas GOP, that they're actually having to make calculations on
00:03:36.120 who they run, because the state's gotten that tight electorally. And I, you know, I remember
00:03:40.740 during the Beto run, you know, conservative media was mocking them, you know, routinely. But a lot
00:03:46.380 of the Texan politicos were saying, like, hey, I don't think you realize, you know, the demographics
00:03:50.880 in this state have changed, right? And things here, this isn't, you know, deep ruby red like
00:03:56.400 it used to be. Obviously, you know, Beto got beat pretty considerably, but it's getting tighter and
00:04:02.000 tighter. And that is, to me, a bit sad that we can't just run a Ken Paxton and know that he's
00:04:07.160 going to be a shoo-in. Yeah, and it's even worse than that. So we just had our Republican, or our
00:04:12.680 primaries, we just had our statewide primaries. And the numbers, the totals finally came out,
00:04:17.780 and more Democrats voted in the primary than Republicans. And this is the first time it's
00:04:24.300 happened in a very long time, by 100,000. So again, you have 100,000 more Democrats in the
00:04:31.540 state of Texas turning out to vote than Republicans. If those numbers maintain,
00:04:36.440 that is not good for the state of Texas as far as Republicans go.
00:04:40.840 Absolutely. And when you were on the show, I think it was the show I was hosting, actually,
00:04:44.560 you were on. I made this point, and this like always triggers people in the audience because
00:04:50.180 they don't like to hear it, but it's just the reality on the situation is because the narrative,
00:04:55.000 not just among Texans, but among like red state people in general, people that reside in red
00:04:58.740 states is, well, you know, the natives of the state are great and super conservative. It's
00:05:03.000 these out of state transplants are the ones that are like really, you know, screwing things up for
00:05:07.180 us politically. But that's just never reflected in data. And there's a handful of states where
00:05:12.120 that might be true. Like I think North Carolina, that probably is true. But if you look at Texas,
00:05:16.660 if you look at Florida, it's the people out of state that are actually voting Republican.
00:05:21.160 It's the natives, specifically in Texas, the natives. And this data point I always cite,
00:05:25.700 and you might have some other data, is from the Cruz-Beta race and the exit polling. And it
00:05:30.200 indicated, not just an exit polling and follow-up polls, that those who said I was not born in
00:05:35.380 Texas voted 55-45 for Cruz. And then those that say I'm a native-born Texan voted 55-45 for
00:05:41.860 Beto. So obviously that would indicate that no, someone that's leaving California, making the
00:05:47.120 decision to leave California is leaving because they're a conservative. They're not like leaving
00:05:50.620 just to ruin another state. Like that's the narrative. And I'm sure there are people that
00:05:53.520 operate like that specifically the ones moving to Austin. But the vast majority of these guys are
00:05:57.540 just like, yeah, you know, I left California for a reason. So I'm going to vote for the leadership
00:06:03.640 that's made the state viable for me to move my family to. Right. You're 100% right. So yeah,
00:06:09.460 you've seen that across the board is whereas texan natives are voting democrat and a lot
00:06:14.120 of people forget texan texas as a state has only been a red state for i think like 30 40 years not
00:06:19.480 very long on the grand scheme of things so it just recently became a republican state um but yeah you
00:06:25.140 have a lot of texas immigrants to texas right uh people from california new york illinois coming
00:06:31.520 and they're realizing why they left and they are voting red uh so that's good right but the texas
00:06:36.920 natives are voting Democrat. And so, yeah, we have a huge problem. Additionally, you know,
00:06:41.400 the state just redrew its districts, which was a huge deal. And a lot of that redrawing was based
00:06:46.680 off the previous fact that Hispanics had kind of started to lean right. Unfortunately, the Hispanics
00:06:55.320 leaned right in the earlier elections, and now they're going back left. Yeah. And that redrawing
00:07:01.640 was based off of the Hispanics. So now it's looking like, man, this maybe was not a good
00:07:07.300 idea. Do you think there's, there's so many different narratives on the Hispanic conservative
00:07:12.540 shift. Um, I think that, I think the number one would be, do you think it was just primarily a
00:07:16.940 Trump thing? Like they just wanted to vote for Trump, but they're not Republicans yet. I mean,
00:07:20.960 that kind of seems to be the obvious explanation there. Yeah. Well, like with any minority,
00:07:26.000 right? Like Hispanics, blacks, whatever it is, they're very tribal, right? So it's all about
00:07:30.940 protecting their own their own tribe and this is to say so like the so yeah to your point like
00:07:36.940 the the support for trump was huge for hispanics they like the machismo attitude they like
00:07:41.320 the aggressiveness they like that and hispanics generally are are generally pro-life uh they don't
00:07:47.320 like the the gay trans stuff and so that was the support for trump but you know they have that
00:07:53.240 asterisk where well i'm right wing except when it comes to like maybe deporting you know relatives
00:07:59.060 or something like that and so you know this the these ice lockdowns which are phenomenal by the
00:08:03.720 way these ice raids and yeah these deportations which are really good and the country needs a
00:08:07.560 war of actually Hispanics that were maybe slightly leaning towards Trump are now like well hey you're
00:08:13.700 deporting my cousin or you're supporting a friend of a friend right and they they don't like that
00:08:17.720 you've seen a lot of this drama happening especially in the RGV the the the borderline
00:08:23.160 the southern borderline of Texas where the Hispanics that were previously for Trump they're
00:08:27.340 seeing all these deportations happen and they're like well maybe i'll vote for the democrat this
00:08:31.140 time around and it's not good well and as i understand it i went i went to high school in
00:08:36.280 the san antonio area so i am like a slightly familiar with sort of the dynamics especially
00:08:40.460 in the rgv um because you know so many people from the rgv moved to san antonio um hey ontario
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00:09:15.280 And something that I was told, I don't know if this is still the case.
00:09:18.440 This maybe sounds like it was more of a 20th century thing, but I don't know.
00:09:21.240 Maybe you can enlighten me here.
00:09:22.600 is that they said that they kind of had like a clannish way of voting in the sense of
00:09:26.960 there would be like one or two people in a family that would really like kind of be the
00:09:31.000 negotiators, you know, with the, with the local politicians. And then they would make the decision
00:09:34.940 for the family on who they were going to vote for. It was almost like a micro version of block
00:09:38.380 voting where you would see like Brownsville rapidly swing from Democrat to Republican,
00:09:42.140 just based off of like what a few of the, you know, grandfathers, you know, like what their
00:09:46.520 relationship was like with the local councilmen or something like that. Yeah. It's funny you bring
00:09:50.980 that up because that is the case even in the republican yeah the republican party down there
00:09:56.180 where you have members of a family that run the the local gop clubs or groups or parties down
00:10:03.380 there and so you'll have like the husband the wife the cousin the in-laws they're all part of this
00:10:09.560 group right and then their uncle is also in office and so like everybody kind of coalesced around
00:10:14.920 supporting a certain person and they're all business owners so like they you almost have
00:10:19.360 to vote for them because you have business dealings with such and such. So yeah, a lot of
00:10:23.040 these decisions are made, like you said, like clans or like group voting. And you can argue
00:10:29.200 that's good or bad. I'm not a big fan of it, but that's just kind of the mindset with the Hispanics
00:10:34.460 down there for sure. So this is what's interesting, kind of to your point with the demographic
00:10:40.160 shifts that we're seeing in Texas, certainly on the voting edge. I think this explains that,
00:10:45.900 You know, people, I think maybe they think when they think Texas and we're saying on
00:10:49.980 the show, like, hey, Texas natives are voting Democrat, they're voting blue.
00:10:54.020 And a lot of people react negatively to that because their perception of what a Texan is
00:10:58.460 or what Texas demographics look like is frozen from like 1980.
00:11:02.280 And the reality is this is not the case anymore.
00:11:05.080 I mean, the overwhelming majority of births in Texas are not white.
00:11:08.200 I think like only like 25, 30% of native born or if you took a birth in 2026, you know,
00:11:14.420 25%, I think it's 25 to 30% of those are going to be white. So, you know, your demographic that's
00:11:20.740 most likely to vote Republican is now a fraction of the population. That explains why Texas natives
00:11:27.060 increasingly so are voting blue. Because, I mean, you did point out that it shifted to a red state
00:11:31.740 fairly recently. But, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of those former Democrat voters
00:11:36.000 were just Dixiecrat voters. And that's why you saw Arkansas was voting blue until the 90s,
00:11:40.000 or why West Virginia was voting blue until the 2000s. Not saying they're necessarily Dixiecrats
00:11:43.740 up there. But, you know, you kind of had the white working class, so to speak, voting for the
00:11:47.660 Democrat Party, where now this new, you know, the new coalition, the Obama coalition is made up the
00:11:54.260 majority of Texas, you know, Texans. I mean, that's just like reality on the ground, rather.
00:12:00.500 Yeah. And to your point, like the data has shown that Hispanic children enrollment in public
00:12:06.140 schools has now outpaced white children enrolling, right? Which says that Hispanics are not only
00:12:12.560 having more children, but there's probably more Hispanics just coming to Texas, either legally
00:12:16.580 or legally anyway. So you've got your first situation now where you've got a state where
00:12:21.420 the majority of children that are enrolling in public schools are Hispanic. So that leaves whites
00:12:26.680 as a minority group, right? Which a longer, maybe different discussion is, will do whites now
00:12:31.640 benefit from minority benefits and programs and stuff? And I think they should, right, in this
00:12:36.980 case. But yeah, and you can argue it every way you want, but it's a problem. It's a problem.
00:12:44.100 You've seen education decrease in Texas. You've seen reading rates and math rates and
00:12:48.540 all of that has gone down year over year and it's not getting any better. And we just passed
00:12:54.940 school choice, which is a whole different other argument about whether or not that's actually
00:12:58.860 going to help the problem in Texas. But the demographics are changing and it's not a good
00:13:02.440 outlook for the state of texas and with democrats now voting in more primaries than republicans
00:13:07.880 either republicans need to wake up and figure out how to run the party better you know we've got a
00:13:13.000 we've got a republican party chair it's an indian guy wasn't born in america who's running the
00:13:17.400 republican party of texas and you know he's been outvoted in his primary so is the party being run
00:13:24.040 well i don't think so and i think a lot of people don't feel that way either i mean that was it's so
00:13:28.280 bizarre to me i mean again you could probably enlighten me a little bit on this situation but
00:13:32.660 just being an outsider watching this herrera gonzalez race and i'm like this gonzalez guy has
00:13:37.760 such a track record that it's like absurd he's like a super villain and he's running
00:13:43.120 for the house i'm like what if you're the state gop why are you not reeling this guy in or or
00:13:47.760 shepherd soaking him or something and throwing someone else out there and herrera is great and
00:13:51.420 i'm glad he won you know he seems like a really nice guy and everything but you know he's not
00:13:56.400 ordinarily winning that race unless he is running against someone that's such a train wreck like
00:14:00.300 gonzalez you're 100 right and you know he ran against gonzalez last cycle he only lost i think
00:14:06.760 by less than 200 votes so he got pretty close you know this scandal happened um you know we broke
00:14:12.380 it back in september about gonzalez having an affair with his former staffer married staffer
00:14:16.960 and and then her killing herself um you know if if that hadn't happened you gotta wonder would
00:14:23.240 would Herrera have been able to really pull it off as well as he did, right? And they were still
00:14:28.600 heading to a runoff. The only reason they're not heading to a runoff anymore is because
00:14:31.720 Gonzalez decided not to run for re-election, but he hasn't resigned. He's still in office.
00:14:37.280 But yeah, you've got to wonder if the party is doing enough to actually get people to turn out
00:14:41.540 and they're hitting the politicians that are not actually good conservatives. I don't know. I don't
00:14:48.180 know what they're doing with their time down there in Austin. It's bizarre. I've pointed this out in
00:14:52.600 the show where it seems like the deeper red the state is, the worse the state GOP is. Now, Texas
00:14:57.860 obviously is, to your point, kind of swung, you know, swinging bluer and bluer. But, you know,
00:15:03.020 this is still the GOP that operates like it's a plus 15, plus 20 Republican state. And the fact
00:15:08.640 that the senators are John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, it's like, what are we doing? You know, because
00:15:13.040 Texas is the most important state for the Republican Party. I mean, I guess you could
00:15:16.940 say Florida now, but, you know, Texas is, you get that of the George Bush, and that's where a lot of
00:15:21.420 these apparatuses are built. Dallas-Fort Worth is, you know, a hub for conservatism. And the best
00:15:26.580 we can, you know, throw out, because look at the Democrats, the offerings they have out of
00:15:30.240 California, it's like some of those radical senators in the country. And then this is what
00:15:34.420 we have coming out of, and that just really exemplifies, I think, like, cowardice, for lack
00:15:38.200 of a better word, that kind of runs throughout the leadership of the Texas GOP, because the base
00:15:42.820 in Texas, I think Texas Republicans generally are some of the more hardline conservative
00:15:49.780 of voters in the whole country. They're not soft on a lot of issues, I guess because they're on
00:15:54.640 the forefront of a lot of them. Yeah, it's interesting, right? There's a lot of them like
00:15:58.880 that. But we just had our primary race between Cornyn and Paxton and Wesley Hunt. And in that
00:16:06.800 race, even I was anticipating that Paxton was just going to destroy Cornyn. In fact,
00:16:12.620 Paxton himself thought that he was going to destroy Cornyn. He was recorded on video saying
00:16:17.400 in an interview there was data potentially showing that paxton could win outright you
00:16:22.200 wouldn't even trigger a runoff yeah but come election day the numbers show cornyn actually
00:16:27.300 out out one paxton more people voted for john cornyn than paxton and so it's like is this you
00:16:35.440 know paxton for for as great as he is you got to ask yourself why are dem why do why do democrats
00:16:40.960 want ken paxton to win why like that's it's like a red flag whether you love ken or not that is a
00:16:46.580 red flag and a lot of the you know we we you and i and many others we live in this bubble where
00:16:52.620 we're surrounded by people who consume politics whether recreationally or for for profession
00:16:58.200 and so we we surround ourselves more with people who agree with us and believe with us and are far
00:17:02.820 right you know like us but the fact of the matter is a normie maybe fox news listener that just
00:17:09.360 listens to news every day on tv they maybe find problems with ken paxton's affairs and scandals
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00:18:06.580 They're going to vote for John Cornyn.
00:18:08.060 And so I think the party needs to do a better job of outreach and getting better messaging out.
00:18:13.240 Yeah, absolutely.
00:18:14.260 I mean, with Cornyn, I guess Tallarico is considered such a potentially dangerous figure that it is worth just –
00:18:22.260 and I think someone made the point they're kind of gaming out why Trump would endorse Cornyn.
00:18:26.420 I personally think it's just because he's bad at endorsements.
00:18:29.140 I don't think there's any extra game going on here.
00:18:31.620 But some people were saying, well, with the Paxton fiasco where he said, like, hey, I'll drop out if we get the Save Act passed.
00:18:37.860 I respect that. I think that's noble. I like that a lot. And so people are speculating, well, maybe that's why Trump endorsed Cornyn is to get the Save Act across the finish line. And again, he knows that Cornyn is probably more of a shoe in in the general election. Do you think there's anything to that? Or do you think it's with my kind of initial assessment that I think he's just kind of bad at endorsements and Cornyn is probably just nice to him when they see him see each other?
00:19:00.000 i think it's a mix of all of it right like you got we got to remember that trump endorsed tony
00:19:04.180 gonzalez right like talk about bad endorsements trump love him or hate him he's horrible at
00:19:09.580 endorsements right he's not good and the fact of the matter is like his endorsements at least in
00:19:14.580 texas are meaning a lot less he endorsed uh sid miller the ag commissioner here and sid miller
00:19:19.960 lost yeah okay so a lot of trump's endorsements actually lost versus governor greg abbott's
00:19:25.320 endorsements. Um, so yeah, you're, you're seeing this, this change in, in, in how Trump's
00:19:31.240 endorsements are perceived. And yeah, I think it's a combination of Trump's batted endorsements
00:19:34.980 and also, you know, calculating who can be, who can we, who can win against Tallarico.
00:19:39.780 Tallarico is a far left Democrat, like super, super far left, but, uh, he's perceived by normies
00:19:48.300 as a moderate democrat he talks very slow very gentle he's a christian he's a pastor he like
00:19:57.380 all this stuff and to normies who just view him as his interviews i mean he was even on
00:20:01.360 the joe rogan show yeah podcast to normies that see that they're like okay this is a guy who's
00:20:07.140 moderate he's a democrat but you know he's not as far right as trump i might consider voting for him
00:20:11.740 and but to people that actually know a little bit about him like you and i and your listeners
00:20:16.500 we know that this guy's a far left democrat sure um and so the party itself and others need to do
00:20:21.900 a better job of bringing out that far left rhetoric that tallarico has said in the past
00:20:26.660 to let people know who he actually is i mean because it's it's not hard to see someone like
00:20:33.040 him slipping through because again everyone in georgia that georgia senate race a few years ago
00:20:37.420 and everyone was thinking the same thing like well you know okay it's still a red state you know just
00:20:41.200 because the democrats are um you know ascendant it's still a red state you know what are you
00:20:45.300 going to do it's georgia then ossoff and warnock your two senators so it's like not hard to see a
00:20:50.300 situation in texas where just you know corn or paxton you know like to your point i mean if
00:20:54.600 paxton gets in you know a few hit pieces talarico gets a few more slam dunk interviews we're looking
00:21:00.380 at a talarico senator you know senator from texas uh james talarico yeah i i anticipate if ken
00:21:06.080 paxton wins this runoff and it's a paxton versus talarico race that the democrats are going to hit
00:21:11.360 packs an incredibly hard on affairs and scandals and money issues and staffing issues and um you
00:21:18.760 know normies don't like that stuff they you know we we people like us we can we can look past maybe
00:21:25.700 the affairs um me personally i can't but we can look past the multiple affairs to justify voting
00:21:31.080 for somebody who's going to vote a certain way that we need but a normie may view it as like
00:21:36.840 a character issue. They're like, well, you know, I really can't get behind this. You know,
00:21:40.880 I can't support this. And they may end up flipping for Tallarico. And so this is a very
00:21:45.120 serious problem. And unfortunately, the turnout also has massive ramifications for the down
00:21:51.720 ballot. Democrats voting just because there's a Senate race, they're going to turn out and vote
00:21:55.480 Democrat for the entire ballot down ballot. And so those have big ramifications for Texas
00:22:00.360 all across the state. Do you think this is kind of interesting? I guess this is kind of old news
00:22:06.360 in a way but i'm just curious what your thoughts were because again you would have the inside scoop
00:22:09.580 here with the whole colbert tallarico situation we you know what happened like tim cast we covered
00:22:15.760 it extensively i mean tim like an hour on it it was pretty crazy but my question would be do you
00:22:20.660 think that that was the texas democrats like terrified of jazz like their internal polling
00:22:25.100 was saying jasmine crockett is like toxic let's keep her off the ballot or do you think that was
00:22:29.520 just you know tallarico and colbert are boys like what do you think specifically was the motivation
00:22:33.480 Because it does seem like it was an electoral play in that primary, and obviously it worked.
00:22:39.080 Yeah, I think maybe a little bit of both, right?
00:22:40.640 It's manufactured outrage, right?
00:22:42.020 Like the whole thing was kind of a setup.
00:22:44.100 I do think that maybe the Democrat leaders in charge or whatever would maybe viewed Crockett as a worse candidate, because she is.
00:22:55.260 And so, yeah, they were definitely pushing for Tallarico.
00:22:57.500 And I think Democrats, you know, we had a special election here in in the Dallas area where a it was a plus 17 Republican district and a Democrat won it.
00:23:08.940 So that's huge. A Democrat won a plus 17 Republican district over a Republican.
00:23:15.580 So the Democrat won that. And the guy who won the Democrat is a normal looking white dude.
00:23:21.420 Yeah. Decent looking white guy. Looks like he goes to the gym. Right.
00:23:24.160 And now you've got Tallarico, who's another white guy. I really feel that the Democrats have finally woken up and realized, like, we need to run normal looking people to win races. You can't run these trans or freaks or outlandish people because they're just not going to win. And so I think they figured that out. And Tallarico's a, at least facing, he's a normal looking white guy.
00:23:44.840 Yeah, exactly. And the Republicans are going the other direction. Like, Virginia, everyone's so pissed about Spanberger, as they should be. And it's like, well, you ran a diversity candidate. I mean, she's from Jamaica. Like, what are we doing here? And it's all because she just had like a photo shoot with a gun. And they're like, oh, wow, this is like finally a black woman that gets it. Like, what are we doing?
00:24:05.520 Meanwhile, that's Youngkin's secret is Youngkin just was reflective of the largest group in America, which is white men.
00:24:13.840 Also, what group votes?
00:24:15.260 The majority of voters, for the record, are white people and white men.
00:24:20.660 Just run people that look like them, and you might actually win decisively.
00:24:24.560 And the Democrats finally figured it out.
00:24:26.400 Granted, I think it's because they ran Kamala.
00:24:27.660 There was that tweet after Kamala lost where it was the picture of all the frat bros in a line, and they're like, here's every Democrat candidate going forward.
00:24:33.920 yeah and that's that's i think they figured out and the republican party like you said is kind of
00:24:38.380 swung the other way i mean like look like you have a lot of really weird candidates running
00:24:42.440 in the republican party like valentina gomez um love her for what she does maybe and whatever
00:24:47.700 her rhetoric but she's a horrible candidate like barely speaks english horrible accent
00:24:52.760 yeah not even from texas ran ran and didn't even make a runoff like had a horrible performance
00:24:59.360 right um so you've got a lot of these and again going back to the republican party chairman you've
00:25:05.100 got a guy who wasn't born in america has a incredibly thick indian accent and you know
00:25:11.020 now look where the state is look at the state where we're at right and so yeah you've got a
00:25:15.440 problem where like maybe the democrats have figured out we've got to run decent looking normal
00:25:19.440 normal people to run and the republican party's like well you know we'll win over all these
00:25:24.260 minority votes by by getting in all these strange people and yeah and strange outliers to run and
00:25:30.520 maybe that'll get us votes and um clearly it's not working yeah like let's just go down to costco and
00:25:35.200 like pluck people out at random and then we'll run them for office what are we doing here because
00:25:39.580 like trump ran up the numbers with hispanic and did very well with black voters i'm not saying
00:25:44.480 that should be the objective but it's like great if they're gonna vote for us that's sick what did
00:25:48.140 trump do he didn't really do anything he kind of just like plowed forward because if anything 2024
00:25:53.460 was this campaign where he pandered the least and that's where he like ran up the numbers with them
00:25:58.960 so it's like you don't even need to do that the democrats realize this they're like look whether
00:26:02.920 it's crockett or talarico like these groups are client like client voters they're going to vote
00:26:07.200 for us no matter what and then they can i guess ballot harvest to make up the difference if they're
00:26:10.960 going to fall short so they realize that but the republicans are like let's maybe if we run a
00:26:15.460 trans black guy but he has a gun then you know maybe they'll finally vote for us and i think of
00:26:22.240 I think a lot of, I think it's keeping a lot of people home.
00:26:24.780 I mean, I do think that the majority of Texans would probably be like, of course I want Paxton
00:26:29.280 over Cornyn, but a lot of those people are just disengaged.
00:26:31.900 They're kind of demoralized to an extent.
00:26:33.980 They're really just fixated on what's happening in the White House, and they're just not particularly
00:26:37.620 interested in, you know, what a senator could possibly offer for them, or certainly what
00:26:42.500 their local candidates could possibly offer.
00:26:45.000 I mean, that's why I think people like you, that your work's so essential, because it's
00:26:48.500 putting it on their doors.
00:26:49.360 Like, actually, this directly affects you.
00:26:50.820 What's happening in the White House, you may see it at the pump, and that's about it.
00:26:54.540 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:26:55.400 And these Senate races, congressional races are super important.
00:26:58.840 We, as a RAG media outlet, we focus a lot on the municipal stuff.
00:27:03.520 Most people can't even name one person on their city council or their mayor.
00:27:08.280 And that's a problem.
00:27:09.720 Those are the things that really affect you.
00:27:11.520 Are they as exciting as these congressional races and these Senate races?
00:27:15.400 No.
00:27:15.620 but the guy who's the mayor of your city or the people on your school board have a huge effect
00:27:21.280 on your taxes as a business owner or a homeowner or even a renter in the city you live in. So yeah,
00:27:27.480 a lot of people aren't paying attention to this local stuff, and maybe that's why they're not
00:27:31.380 turning out to vote. The Republican Party as a whole needs to do better about getting that
00:27:36.920 messaging out so that Republicans don't just turn out every once in a while in an election to vote
00:27:43.460 in a very popular Senate race, but they actually turn out to vote in their municipal elections or
00:27:48.420 school board elections and things like that. This is all grim, obviously. Are there any white
00:27:54.460 pills you would have for any Texans watching? Are there any indications that in some ways things
00:27:59.060 are moving in the right direction? Or do you think on the whole, it's like alarm bells going off?
00:28:03.560 There's some good indications or good elections that we have. We got Dan Crenshaw out of office.
00:28:09.640 We got Steve Toth in there, and Toth is a phenomenal former statehouse rep, and now he's going to be in office there.
00:28:16.780 Sid Miller, love the guy, funny, cool, stereotypical Texas-looking guy, but he wasn't doing a great job.
00:28:24.840 The ag commissioner, which controls – for a lot of people that don't know, the ag commissioner controls the farming, the livestock, everything that's really, really important in Texas.
00:28:33.780 And we got Nate Sheets in there. Nate Sheets is a phenomenal candidate, former business owner who is incredibly intelligent. He's going to do a lot for the state of Texas and the economy. So we've got those races. Don Huffines won for Texas Comptroller. So the Comptroller position is a really, really big deal here in the state. And you've got Don Huffines in there. And so he's going to do a really great job.
00:28:57.160 So yeah, we've got a lot of good wins in here. People are paying attention to specific races. But I think what really the party needs to focus on is turnout, getting actual other Republicans that don't normally vote actually out from their homes and to the ballot box to vote.
00:29:12.060 yeah because that was so interesting to me that you said there was uh the democrats at the edge
00:29:15.800 and primary voting because i did look under the hood and that republican register i mean there's
00:29:19.600 far more republicans registered than the democrats i mean obviously the gap's probably tightening up
00:29:23.380 i would imagine but if we just had the same apparatus that they had i'm not even saying
00:29:28.120 like we need to do the middle of the night mail mail mail uh with the drop boxes or whatever but
00:29:33.100 like if we just had an apparatus where we could go to these suburbs just knock on a few doors and
00:29:37.480 say i don't know like are you take are you gonna go vote no okay do you want me to do it for you
00:29:40.680 Like, why are we not doing it?
00:29:43.060 We could be running up the numbers in Texas and doing whatever we wanted.
00:29:46.660 Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, Republicans run at a handicap in the sense of, like, we don't have the apparatus that Democrats do.
00:29:54.940 Democrats have all of Hollywood supporting them, all these corporations supporting them.
00:30:00.120 They used to have a lot of social media accounts supporting them and influencers.
00:30:03.880 And Republicans, we have to run on kind of, you know, different types of methods to get our vote out.
00:30:09.060 and but yeah you know it there there needs to be more brainstorming on how you get actual
00:30:15.400 republicans to turn out and vote it's just it's it's currently not not happening at the rate it
00:30:19.540 should yeah and it's like the weirdest thing is on social media i mean i'm not you know picking
00:30:24.580 on anyone here because there's a lot of people that are doing this but you know these election
00:30:28.160 specialists and then they're like registering people at like the grocery stores and gas stations
00:30:33.140 but they're it's like new jersey and i'm like that's great but we're literally going to lose
00:30:37.600 texas like we could realistically lose texas georgia's probably gone north carolina's on the
00:30:43.220 way out it's like shouldn't we be a shoring up numbers in these states and b should we think a
00:30:48.020 little more outside of the box and like voting drives because it's like sick okay we registered
00:30:50.960 a bunch of voters like we saw in new jersey it's like wow like republicans are tearing up democrats
00:30:54.720 at voter registration and then we got like like smoked in the election so it's like maybe we need
00:31:00.500 a little more because you go look what the democrats are up to and they're literally like
00:31:03.980 performing supervillain levels of like voting extraction like it's the most amazing they have
00:31:08.100 like inventions they've come up with out of nowhere to extract votes out of these neighborhoods and
00:31:12.700 it's remarkable really yeah like a field work is so important right door knocking uh hitting doors
00:31:18.120 is so incredibly important a lot of people republicans especially love to just sit on
00:31:22.120 facebook or twitter or x and just talk about politics all day but average normie voter isn't
00:31:28.420 they the average normie voter is still working a nine to five in a cubicle and gets a lot of their
00:31:33.400 news either from talk radio on the way to work or from fox news in the break room at the office
00:31:38.320 right or at home they don't get it from x they don't get it from facebook they don't get it from
00:31:43.020 these influencers or instagram or tiktok and so yeah you've got to get to the got to get to these
00:31:47.920 people and talk to them about these races because otherwise they just continue to vote uh whenever
00:31:53.060 they feel like a major election is happening and so and yeah in a non-presidential year when trump
00:31:57.900 is not on the ballot they're staying home they're not voting and dude with how rancid the discourse
00:32:02.740 has gotten online it might be better off if these people are watching fox news like it's so bad now
00:32:07.880 yeah the social media stuff's out of control the biggest thing that's been at least affecting
00:32:12.820 texans a lot is these paid influencers you have a lot of these political celebrities that are
00:32:17.280 getting paid to promote or shill certain candidates and they're putting out these
00:32:22.500 narratives that you know that won't come election day they completely crumble and and it's just not
00:32:27.240 the case. And, you know, I would warn, especially, you know, Republicans and your viewers probably
00:32:33.500 already know, but like a lot of these influencers you see online that are promoting specific
00:32:36.960 candidates, they are possibly getting paid to promote these candidates. And then these candidates
00:32:41.880 lose and they're like doing the shocked Pikachu face, like how did this happen? But it's because
00:32:47.320 they're getting paid to do it and it's not a genuine endorsement. And so, yeah, it's really
00:32:52.000 it's really important to to exercise kind of uh discernment over who's endorsing who and why
00:32:57.840 yeah no i totally agree well tony thank you so much for hopping on dude it's always fantastic
00:33:02.720 and thanks for having me take yeah where where can people find you to get more yeah big big help
00:33:07.700 would be following us if you're a texan we're a must follow you could follow us at current revolt
00:33:11.840 on x uh instagram facebook are the same uh but if you want daily texas news in your inbox just go
00:33:17.300 to current revolt.com and put your email in there and you can subscribe awesome well thank you so
00:33:21.560 much tony we'll catch you next time thanks for having me hey ontario come down to bet mgm casino
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