The Dispatch Podcast - Revenge of the Incumbents in Georgia

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Erick Erickson, host of the Erick Erickson Show, joins Steve for a conversation about what we learned from the primary election results in Georgia, and what it all means for November and beyond. Steve is then joined by Khaya Himmelman to discuss her fact check of Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary film 2,000 Mules.   Show Notes: -Erick Erickson: “Trump's 2000 Mules Got Stuck in Georgia Clay” -Erick Erickson: “The Democrats Don't Want a Solution to Gun Violence” -Khaya’s fact check: “Fact Checking Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘2,000 Mules’” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by Eric Erickson, who authors the substack newsletter called Confessions of a Political Junkie. Eric is a prominent conservative activist nationally, a leading talk radio host in Georgia. And we had Eric on to talk about the election results in Georgia from Tuesday and the national implications of those election results. After that, we are joined by Kaya Himmelman, who is a fact checker at the dispatch and spent time looking at Dinesh D'Souza's latest film 2000 Mules applying her great scrutiny to that and writing up a terrific fact check for the dispatch. We ask her some questions about the film, its claims, and how she goes about fact checking.

Eric, great to have you back on the Dispatch podcast. Why did Brian Kemp win so decisively in Georgia last night? Because people know him. As much as this really was about Trump, and I didn't think it was going to be as much about Trump until I saw the Raffordsberger car numbers. But incumbency still had a ton to do with it. Trump was very successful in open races, getting his picks.

but where there was an existing person that the voters knew, he wasn't successful at all. And even in some of his races in open seats, his guys are struggling to be in second place headed into runoffs where the front place person is by a wide margin. Yeah, so interesting. So I listened to your show slash podcast late last week and was riding my bike listening to you

and listening to you make the argument that you didn't think it was going. Well, I need inspiration, right? And there's nothing that inspires more than, more than that. It is my time. It takes the place of my time to read when I can actually, like, get it out of a podcast. But I heard you make the case that you didn't think it was likely to be about Trump. But you've evolved on that question. What specifically is just because Kemp was an incumbent and had a record and could run on that?

Right. I mean, I said the day. that David Perdue announced he was running that there was no way he was going to win back in December because of Kim's record. David Purdue admitted Stacey Abrams lured him into running back when he did it. He told the Atlanta Journal that the only reason he was announcing then was because of her. But he announced a month before George's legislature convened, which allowed Kemp to reprioritize everything he wanted in the legislature and get conservative win after conservative win after conservative win. So with Kemp, yeah, it had way more to do with him than it had to do

with Trump. You look at some of the other races, though, Raffordsberger. Inarguably was helped by some Democrats, by the way, but he won. Chris Carr, the attorney general, I mean, crushed it. John King, the insurance commissioner that no one nationally heard of, but I mean, he was running against a guy who had signs everywhere with big bold letters Trump endorsed. He got crushed as well by the incumbent. So there definitely was a Georgia Republicans love Trump, but they're ready to move on factor. but there was also, we kind of like Brian Kemp himself. Yeah, let's talk about Kemp for a minute because I think that's an underreported part of the story. I mean, there's so much to read everywhere about what was going to happen yesterday and now what's happened.

But I think one of the things that you've really focused on that people naturally haven't focused on enough is Kemp's record is a governor. There tends to be in the sort of sloppy way that we talk about the right in, from, 2015 on this sort of Trump era plus, there tends to be this shorthand that either you're conservative and you're with Trump or you're a squish or you're a rhino. That is not the case. I mean, Brian Kemp was not a Trump. He's not a Trumpy guy, but he's definitely a conservative. He governed as a conservative. I would argue one of the more conservative governing records of any governor in the country. Yeah, look, when Brian Kipp came into office in 2018, he said the economy has been too good for too long. It's going to slow down.

While the good times are here, we need budget cuts from every office in the state. And he got them. And he used some of those funds to raise teacher pay raises. But otherwise, he started packing away budget surpluses. Now, what happened was COVID, not an economy economic slowdown, although that came because of it. So now he's been able to give big tax cuts because they had all these reserves, increased teacher pay without raising taxes. He's actually reduced taxes. He passed the fetal heartbeat legislation, constitutional carry for gun owners. He's given expanded school choice opportunities in the state. He's done everything conservative say they want.

And in fact, was the guy who reopened the state of Georgia while everybody else was still shut down and got heckled by Donald Trump for doing so. And the very Trump base who turned on him were the loudest cheerleaders of Kemp at the time. Yeah, I find that one of the most interesting sort of wrinkles in this recent history. People forget that Kemp reopened Georgia. He took a ton of grief for having done. So I remember the Atlantic article basically saying this is an experiment in human... Yeah, that was the title was Georgia's experiment in human sacrifice. In human sacrifice.

Yeah, yeah. So he took a ton of grief. And Trump not only sort of poked him about it, he blasted him. I mean, I think is it overstating it to say that that was really one of the points of greatest divergence between Trump and Kemp was that Kemp was on the side of opening things up earlier than Trump wanted things opened up? Yeah, I mean, it really was. That was, Kemp was the first Republican governor that Trump criticized, criticized him twice. very publicly on primetime television, and there was furious blowback from the national press court. Kemp was having to go on and defend himself even on Fox News for why he was reopening

the state. But he stuck to his guns. And his entire argument, for those who don't understand his argument, was we're not shutting down the state to stop the spread of a virus because we can't do that, but we can shut down the state for a month, figure out how we're going to inventory all of the state respirators, do a supply chain check, move them between hospitals easily, get the National Guard in, figure it all out, and get all the hospitals in 30 days on a brand new computer system so that every hospital integrates their inventory so they can see, hey, this hospital needs masks, this one has an oversupply. They spent 30 days on that and then said, okay, we've got the hospital supply chain locked in. Let's reopen. And by the way, the virus didn't actually

spread until Memorial Day in the George Floyd riots when people started getting out and about and either in protests or on holiday and it started skyrocketing. But the state had an overabundance of supply because of that one month shutdown. I mean, I will say I was skeptical. When Kemp made these announcements, I was skeptical that it would be effective. I thought it was too early. And now we're at the point where what he was arguing then has become the conventional view among Republicans and Democrats, by the way, on this, which I think it's just a notable episode. I think it gets, again, gets forgotten in a lot of the lookbacks on the Trump-Kemp relationship, just how significant that moment was.

And I have to believe that it was something that was in the minds of Georgia voters as they went to the polls, you know, early voting over the past few days and then went to the polls yesterday. He took on Trump, he took on Trump on, you know, I think what we would all agree is a meeting policy issue and then had been vindicated in the months since because he made that decision. I just think that has to matter even, and I want to get to the sort of all the Trump lies about the election and Raffinsberger's race, but I think it's policy decisions like that. I mean, that one being sort of the most obvious where he can say, look, I did it this way, that guy did it that way. Without ever having to say Trump made a mistake, I mean, it's not like

Brian Kemp was campaigning saying Trump made a mistake on COVID, therefore vote for me. He didn't take Trump on in that sense. No, he didn't. In fact, he's been gone through great pains to avoid criticizing Trump, even when Trump's been firing at him on the campaign trail. He didn't want to alienate any of Trump supporters who might vote for him. But that was you talk to voters in the state all the time, the economy and Brian Kemp saving the their businesses. And then there was this resonating factor, particularly among evangelicals, that they're seeing all these other states where churches were closed and Kemp never shut down churches in Georgia. In fact, even talked about how his mother refused to stay home and insisted

on going to church. And he finally had to get the head of State Department of Public Health explaining to her why you, ma'am, given your demographics, should not be going to church right now. But he absolutely refused to shut him down. How much was it a factor? I mean, Kemp, it looks like, is going to end up when all of the votes are counted winning by 52 points, maybe even slightly more. How much of a factor was it that it was pretty obvious in the last week that Purdue was not really a viable challenge? There was a New York Times story. I'm not sure a lot of Georgians were focused on the New York Times story. There was a time story with sort of preemptive blame shifting from,

the Purdue world. Did that matter? People, it's like they, if they went and voted for Purdue, there was a sense that they were throwing away their vote. Look, I actually think the race has been over for a while. I mean, he had no money.

There's a great Politico story on how Kemp worked to cut off David Purdue's fundraising. And it worked. The Purdue team has known it's been over. I thought it was very interesting that members of the Purdue team reached out to me pretty aggressively. every time I said something they disagreed with until about a month, month and a half ago. And they just stopped.

Haven't heard from them since. And that, to me, was one of the signs. And then he took down his commercials weeks ago. In fact, the Kemp team told me that the second week of early voting, we had 21 days in Georgia of early voting. And in the second week, they saw a dip in their tracking polling as Donald Trump made one more aggressive push. And there were a couple of other just ancillary news items. and then it rebounded very quickly and then it kept going up from there.

And so starting really in the third week of early voting, they were at 60% and then they were at 65%. Insider Advantage of polling firm in Georgia came out and showed that it was like 52, 38. I was actually walking around in downtown Atlanta, just taking a break, got a phone call from the campaign and said, our pollster's calling you this poll is BS. And we want to explain to you why.

And their pollster, they actually used a pollster that several other campaigns were using and kind of walked me through how this couldn't be so and began sending me their regular trends. And I honestly, I'm looking at their trends and I'm thinking, this is too good to be true. And they actually undercounted their polling, their closeout tracking poll had them at 63, 64%. Wow. Everybody, the Trafalgar group, Insider Advantage, everybody undercounted. publicly, Fox News came closest, and it only showed 60%. Yeah, right.

I mean, that was the poll that Purdue objected to so strenuously say, there's no way I'm going to lose by 32 points. Yeah, well, he was right. He lost by 50. So I can imagine some of our listeners hearing you say, you know, he ran out of money and thinking, well, gosh, how can that possibly be? David Purdue is an extraordinarily wealthy man if he wanted to put in more money. to do his own campaign he could have.

And Donald Trump is this fundraising juggernaut. I mean, Donald Trump can raise money with the wave of a hand or anything he says. He did some fundraising, and he certainly did some events for David Purdue. Do you think Donald Trump could have done more on Purdue's behalf? Honestly, I don't think so. Trump can raise money for Trump. He didn't do a good job of raising money for Purdue, but he did what he could. In fact, he oversaw several million dollars.

an outside super PAC as well. But the interesting trivia at the end of this race, Stacey Abrams has raised more money from people inside Georgia than David Purdue did. And Abrams, 78% of her money comes from outside the state, but 80% of David Purdue's money came from outside of the state. David Purdue has never put his own money in his campaigns. Even his 2014 Senate race, he was attacked for only putting $500,000 in,

did the same thing this time. He always relies on outside donors. and they were not there for him. I mean, Kemp was not ruthless, but was very strategic. He went to everyone he thought Purdue might get money from and made the case to them that he was the guy. And then he had Sonny Purdue's machine go to bat for him, which David expected to be in his corner since their cousins.

I mean, Alec Pointevin, who's a big name in Georgia in Republican politics, has been the chairman of every single Purdue campaign for anyone named Purdue in the state of Georgia and went behind Brian Kemp. That's a pretty striking detail. Let's shift to the Brad Raffensberger race, because I think in some ways it's even more significant. Raffensberger, of course, was the Secretary of State who defied Trump. He was the one who received the call from Trump, where Trump was clearly threatening Raffinsberger to scare up more votes, asked him go find more votes, pushed him again and again.

and Raffensberger said, no, eventually the audio of that phone call leaked. I think it was, I think it's arguably the most significant fact in the discussion, the debates over, over the impeachment, the second impeachment of Donald Trump. To me, you didn't need anything else. This is the president of the United States calling a state local election official, pressuring him to cheat. Raffinsberger didn't do that. He stood up, he gave a number of speeches.

That's how, that's why we know the name of the Georgia Secretary of State. is because of those events. Yeah, listen, first of all, I'm actually good friends with Jody Heiss who ran against him. I supported Brad publicly so. You know, my audience was not mad at me for supporting any of these other guys.

My audience was furious with me for supporting Raffensberger. And they wanted a sacrificial lamb. They wanted to scapegoat so they could say they did something for Trump. And they were pissed that I supported Raffensberger, who won. but in fairness, 8 to 10% of Democrats crossed over.

So the Democrats are really the ones who got Rafferzberger over the line, but he still got over the line and he shouldn't have. Heist left money on the table thinking there was going to be a runoff. It was a poorly run campaign on his behalf. They left too much money on the table. They played only to the stolen election crowd. There were other arguments they could have made about Raffetzberger. They left on the table.

And honestly, my vantage point is Rafferzerger is not a, an avable, lovable guy. He's very engineer. He's kind of a cold personality. He's not great on the stump. But that man literally went to any event that asked him to come, took all of the arrows, all of the slings, all of the attacks, explained what actually happened, persuaded person after person on an individual basis over the last year. The election wasn't stolen and won by doing it. Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's no question that Democrats switching helped Raffinsberg. I think they helped Kemp as well. They wanted to send them a message, but certainly wanted to send a message by voting for Raffinsberger. And I think you're absolutely right that that's what allowed

him to avoid the runoff. He needed to get 50% plus one. And he got it. I think he was, he's at like 51.5 or something. Yeah, but let me just stop you there. On that, I mean, if you take all the Democrats out, Kemp would have won where the Fox Shoes poll said 60 percent, 60 to 5. Raffersberger would have gotten into a runoff. So the Democrats had more of an impact there. But again, to my point, the Republicans, the heist campaign, the Trump people should have been able to persuade more Republicans, more than 40, 50 percent to go against Raffsberger. They couldn't. I mean, here's the studying data for you, Steve, to put in play this.

Floyd County is Rome, Georgia. That's the heart of Marjorie Taylor Green's district. She got 61% of the vote in Floyd County. Brad Raffensberger in Marjorie Taylor's Anchor County got 61% of the vote. Wow. That's amazing. That is really something. So how much should we, aside from sort of the tactical voting and party switching,

I'm encouraged, and I want you to tell me whether I'm right to be or whether I'm just seeing what I want to see, I'm encouraged by the fact that somebody who showed the integrity that Raffinsberger showed is being rewarded for it. That, as you say, I mean, he went around, he took all the slings and arrows. You know, he didn't, I would say in the public speeches that I saw him give in public appearances that I saw him give while he was campaigning, he didn't seem to go out of his way to stick a finger in the eye of Trump or the voters who supported Trump, But neither did he back away from what he had done and from, you know, how he thought he had performed his duty as, as expected. Am I right to see this as sort of rewarding integrity or am I overreating it?

No, I think you should. And in fact, so it became, it was anecdote yesterday. It was very interesting how it played out on the ground. It was, I got a call yesterday morning from one of the prominent members of the state Senate. and he said, we think Democrats are crossing over into the Republican race. And it kind of freaked everybody out of the morning, like, are they coming in to try to sabotage it, make sure there are runoffs? And by noon, I was getting phone calls from people in Savannah, Valdosta, which is far

South Georgia, Macon, where I live in the middle of the state, saying these Democrats are coming over, that people are surveying them, calling them, seeing, and they're saying they're rewarding Rafsburg. They're not going to vote for them in the general, but they want to thank them. and by the evening anecdote had become data and there was a substantive report out we could see that 8 to 10% were coming in just as a thank you they were rewarding these guys for standing up and it pushed margins up for everybody who still would have won but yeah and then there were a lot of Republicans in the crowd last night with kemp there were hundreds and hundreds of people

and everybody was saying look we like Donald Trump but we're not here to settle his grudges for him we're ready to move on and these are good people right So even in a typical election year, both Kemp and Raffinsberger would be prohibitive favorites going into a general election. But in this electoral environment, it's almost inconceivable that either of them would lose in a general election. Is that fair? Yeah, to give you a sense, so B. Wynn, she's in a runoff. She's a state legislator. She actually has Stacey Abrams' old seat in the legislature, very progressive Democratic district.

she will probably win the, she should win the Democratic runoff to be the Secretary of State. And in her speech last night, before it was apparent that Raffensberger was going to win outright, she was talking about how the Republicans are electing people who are a danger to democracy,

who wanted to overthrow the election, who can't be trusted to run elections. Oh, interesting. By the end of the night, that wasn't the case for any of them. All of Trump's candidates gone, the Democrats will probably still run on the we can't trust them with democracy,

but they're not going to have an easy time. doing it with Raffordsberger, Chris Carr, and Brian Kipp at the head of the ticket. Yeah, I mean, they'd be nuts to make that argument, frankly. Then they have to go back and make sort of traditional democratic arguments, but what the heck do you say? If you're a Georgia Democrat right now, what do you say? I mean, do you run on Biden's agenda? Keep in mind, I mean, Stacey Abrams yesterday tried to pivot on the, I mean, Georgia,

we had record-breaking turnout for the Democrats and Republicans. And Abrams' excuse yesterday when asked about it was, well, you know, there's not a correlation between high voter turnout and voter suppression. Maybe for her there's not, but for your average person, it's clear the Georgia election law didn't suppress people. In fact, my wife actually voted in line. I did absentee. She voted in line.

They were both extremely efficient processes more so than we've ever had. Yeah, if I can be even more blunt, and I'm not usually more blunt than you are. If I can be more blunt, what she says is utter nonsense. It's totally ridiculous. And when you look back at the warnings that she issued, around the Georgia election reforms, you know, she amplified the Joe Biden arguments, that this was Jim Crow of the 21st century, that this was a deliberate attempt to suppress votes,

when, in fact, as we noted in the morning dispatch explainer that we published on April 2, 2021, the legislation expanded voting. And it made it more, it made it easier, made voting more accessible than in many states in the northeast, including Delaware, including Joe Biden's home state. It was a totally disingenuous argument from Democrats then. And this is one of those sort of rare moments in American politics where they were full of shit. They made these bad faith arguments to scare people back then.

They've been exposed. And I think they should be punished for having done what they did. I think so. I mean, they literally cost small businesses in Georgia a lot of money when they inspired Major League Baseball to move the All-Star game out, among other things. Hollywood Studios complaining of the like, and I'm glad to know I can say shit on here, because I'm sorry, I try not to, and then every once in a while, I just, I slip. But, I mean, look, you are absolutely right.

I was an elections lawyer in Georgia. I knew 2020 was not stolen because I knew the procedures and I could see the videos. And I could explain to people what was going on. And I had furious members of my audience, Lord, I spent, before you guys wrote your debunking piece last week. I actually walked there. I had to watch 2,000 mules and explain why it was all garbage and what they were actually seeing and the slights of hand in the video and debunk it. It got all sorts of hate mail, including a teacher at my kid's school complained to my kid about me debunking it. Oh, gosh. Yeah, he won't be coming back next year. But

and then to have the Democrats do the same thing, and one of the arguments I've made this last year and a half or so is your precedents matter too. And when you engage in this level of nonsense, don't expect the Republicans not to do the same thing. Yeah, I want to shift to the, to the Herschel Walker, Raphael Warnock race. But before we go there, one of the things that we know is going to be central to the race between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams is voting. Is voting in general? I think this election law, I think they won't, they won't be able to make a very precise. persuasive case, as Stacey Abrams tried to do yesterday. But we will have revisited the controversies over the Kemp Abrams' 2018 election, where Stacey Abrams still has never conceded. She

sort of claims that she half conceded, but she claims that the election was stolen. You had members of national media, I think many of whom should have known better, long before Trump did all of his nonsense related to 2020, for which he deserves unreserved condemnation, she did a lot of the same things. She made a lot of the same arguments. Can you tell us for people who have not followed or didn't follow in real time exactly what happened in Georgia in 2018, can you just give us a summary? So just real quick, let me say this. I've heard now multiple media outlets say from MSNBC to CNN that Abrams came close in 2018. She actually didn't. She came close to making a runoff. She never came close to winning. She probably would not have won the runoff because Republicans

up until 2021 never lose the runoffs. And they only did then because Trump suppressed his own vote. So that's the case. So I got to back up here a little bit so people understand this. Stacey Abrams began a massive voter registration drive in 2016. She flew. flooded the Secretary of State's office with voter registration paperwork. And then a lot of them had bad information. And Kemp was at the time, Secretary of State. Yes, Kemp was the Secretary of State's office. They couldn't process them.

I forget what the number was, but there were an extraordinary number of people who they had the wrong address. They didn't match Social Security numbers with the federal database. And it seems, in retrospect, to have been almost by design that this happened. But what was so interesting is that Abrams pointed out there were also like 18,000 people who are registered to vote and the Secretary of State wouldn't process their registrations. What it actually was was there were 18,000 high schoolers who registered to vote who had not yet turned 18. And that's what the hold was. But the national media didn't know or didn't care.

They blew it up into this massive story that they were suppressing voters. Actually, almost all of these people except the high schoolers had come from Stacey Abrams' voter. registration group. They all had paperwork errors. They were asking people to fix the errors so they could register. They couldn't reach out to these people because the addresses were wrong. It was all very manufactured. So then you get into the end of the election and Fulton County to Cab County and Cobb County are all run by Democrats. There's the three Metro Atlanta areas. The Democrats sued over the ballots, over the voting machines. It required that those counties take voting machines out of voting booths.

They were subpoenaed by a Democratic judge. Interestingly enough, Nina Totenberg's sister, Amy Totenberg, is the federal judge. So they had all these voting machines that were in a federal courthouse, warehouse being held as evidence in a case. And so then the Democrat said, oh my gosh, we don't have enough voting machines in these. They're suppressing the vote. Well, it was Democratic counties with a Democratic lawsuit that got these voting machines taken out of the counties, which is they created their own problem.

Amazing. I am certain we will be hearing more about that as this general election continues. Let's jump quickly to Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker. I'll just go out on a limb and say Herschel Walker is not a strong candidate. If you've heard him talk, heard him answer questions or maybe better attempt to answer questions, he obviously lacks sort of a grasp of even the most basic of issues in this race. in the country right now. And yet he was championed by Donald Trump. This is the one big race of Donald Trump won sort of going away. There were other candidates. Trump endorsed you won this race. He was endorsed, I think, relatively early by Mitch McConnell. Republican establishment, Republican Maga World was all in on Herschel Walker. Rafael Warnock is a liberal, progressive Democrat. He's not the kind of Democrat who you would expect ordinarily to win a race beyond barring sort of unforeseen or bizarre circumstances like we had when he won the first time or when when who's going to win this?

Like how do you expect this to play out? I've settled along. Let's go with Mitch McConnell first. They tried to get a feel for other candidates in the race because they knew Walker's weaknesses, but he was so dominant in the polling. Donald Trump induced the man to run. But if he got into the race on Donald Trump's behalf, and then the next day, Donald Trump said, under no circumstances, can you vote for Herschel Walker, he'd still run away with it because he's Herschel Walker. People in this state love him.

And so I think he can actually still win. He's going to have to figure out a strategy to neutralize the mental health issues and the attacks on him. He's going to need to acknowledge himself as a victim of unfair attacks or a victim of attacks based on his own admissions. they're going to have to come up with that strategy because it's going to be brutal against them. But, you know, I wrote a couple of weeks ago, if you go back to 1980 during the Carter economy was so bad, you had six Republicans who got into the U.S. Senate on Reagan's coattails. They were terrible candidates. No one expected to win.

They all only served one term before they were removed by the voters. But the economy and Carter were so bad, they got elected. And I kind of see that shaping up here that if Herschel Walker, he doesn't have to debate Raphael Warnock, Everyone knows he can't win a debate against Raphael Warnock, so he can avoid it. Those don't really matter that much anymore. He just goes around the state, makes himself seen, and he's Herschel Walker, the football star. He can win in a really bad environment for the Democrats, and that's what you got. Now, I do have to say that Warnock is the superior candidate who is a great articulate spokesman.

And just, Steve, for those of you who played along at home here, when I watch live streams outside on Sunday nights, have friends over, bourbon and cigars, we watch sports. You see Warnock commercials. And if I'm a white guy in Middle Georgia, the ad that I see is him fighting for small businesses. If you're a black farmer in South Georgia, the ad you see is fighting the Department of Agriculture over historic racism. If you're a gay man in Atlanta, the ad you see is Herschel Walker fighting for

Civil Warfiel Warnock fighting for civil rights. It's the most impressive advertising strategy I've ever seen of a candidate. Is it good enough if he gets a lot of money and he's going to get a lot of money, I would think. Is it enough to potentially beat a Herschel Walker in this kind of environment? I think it can if Walker flubs or if they make it so nasty. And I actually think that's what the Democrats are going to do. And the Republicans I've talked to in Washington, that's their concern, is that they're

going to try to push Herschel Walker over the edge, make him be irrational on the campaign stage in anger or something over the attacks, pushes buttons, cause a flub, and that's what the Republicans are trying to keep from happening. So, yeah, I think Warnock can still win this, but the fact that he's already up, he's spending $750,000 a week on advertising right now in Georgia. And his big TV ad right now is, hey, Washington screwed up,

send me back. I never said I could fix it in just two years. Yeah. Okay, real quickly on Marjorie Taylor Green, because we have to. She won going away. She had a huge percentage of the votes in her district. She's crazy, and that's probably the nicest thing I could say about her.

Are those voters crazy? No. So first of all, you had five people run against her. There was one candidate who could have consolidated the race, a female, Republican, conservative, but you had four guys get in the race who were. refused to get out, even it was clear they couldn't win. Marjorie, though, is very, very popular in that district. You see her signs everywhere in the rural community because while she's crazy on television and it's owning the left, a lot of those people are former Democrats. You know,

converts are the ones who hate what they converted from the most. These people really don't like the Democratic Party there anymore, and Marjorie owns them. And I got to say, there were a lot of stories from businessmen in her district who've had trouble with constituent services, trying to get meetings with her for stuff. But you talk to her constituents generally. She's very, very accessible. She's in the district. She's seen, and they don't take her as TV.

We see her on television. They see her in the district, and she's not necessarily the same person. Is there part of it that is basically an extended middle finger to Washington, too? I mean, just like, I hate Washington. I hate everything. It's forced. She's going up there to blow it up. and I'm for blowing it up.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I got to tell you, the Marjor Taylor Green who runs in the 14th Congressional District is more conservative and more out there than the Marjor Taylor Green who was running in the 6th congressional district before she moved up there. So part of this, you talk to most people, they say it's really an act. Yeah, I mean, I got that impulse back when it was the Tea Party. And the Tea Party folks I knew certainly were not crazy, even if they were labeled as such by the media,

she's actually crazy. She is really nuts, in my opinion. So let me... Well, she's going to be a congresswoman again. I know, I know. We can do better, people. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change

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in Buffalo. This one, I think, it shouldn't necessarily matter that it's children. I mean, any loss of life in a shooting like this is tragic, but it seems to matter more that it's children. It sort of hits you in a different way. You know, I had to talk about it with my kids today. I won't go into details about that, but I found it incredibly difficult thing to talk about.

Just want to get your general reactions than I want to ask you about the newsletter you set out this morning. Well, you know, we've got problems in this country, and I have for years now said, we have to think completely differently from every other country because no other country has a second amendment. No other country has released the genie from the bottle, and we have. There are more guns in this country than there are people,

and that requires us to take a different approach. Whether you like guns or you don't, the reality is, I mean, every family around me has one, multiple guns. My family has tons of guns. It's a different process. And so we say, well, Australia had a gunback program. We're in Scotland, you have to have certain requirements to buy a gun. we're not those countries.

We're the United States with the Second Amendment. We've got more guns than people. So we've got to start thinking differently. And unfortunately, I think that you've got too many politicians out there who can't bring themselves to move beyond the impulses of their bases and the bases have strong desires one way or the other. But on top of that, honestly, we're dealing with the problem of mental health and broken families. Yes. The recurring pattern here, more than 50% of mass shootings in this country come from people with well-documented mental history, apparently even this guy.

And we're not dealing with that particular problem. Yeah. I mean, there's no question that that's a huge part of this. I got your newsletter this morning. Usually I get your newsletter. I look at the headline. I immediately nod my head. I'm like, yes. And then I jump in and I find myself an agreement. with you most of the time. I mean, overwhelming majority of the time. I got this newsletter this morning. I didn't agree with your headline and then I read it. And I think you make some valid points, but I'm still not totally convinced. Let me just give people a sense of what it is and then ask you to explain your argument. The headline is the Democrats don't want a solution to gun violence.

And you talk about Joe Biden giving a speech last night, you know, talking about the opportunity he had to exude sympathy and empathy, but frustrated, I think it's fair to say that you were that he went on the attack, attacked gun manufacturers and immediately sort of started to cast blame. Why don't you think Democrats want a solution to gun violence? Because they need something to run on in November. They don't have anything right now. They've tried Trump. They've tried Trump Republicans in January 6th.

They've tried the Supreme Court in abortion. None of that stuff has worked. None of it's improved their polling. So I think they'll do this. If they have a solution before November, it takes that off the table and moves back to the economy and inflation. And that puts them. Now, I can tell you I'm right, whether you believe me or not, because Jake Sherman just tweeted this. Schumer signals no gun bill imminent.

Americans can make a choice, Schumer says. Americans can cast their vote in November based on how people stand on guns. Schumer says Republicans can work with Democrats now to craft a bill, unlikely burn in the past, he says. Yeah, I would say that that is, that bolsters your argument. Yeah, so listen, the Democrats want to impose a level of gun control in this country. When you talk to Republicans behind the scenes, oftentimes what they say is very much the same thing with Democrats on abortion, that if we this one time offer some restriction, then they're going to come. back and want more and more and more. And so we have to say no now and draw a line in the sand. Otherwise, you're going to keep coming and coming and come and say, well, you compromised last

time. So compromise this time. There are ways to get bipartisan support for something, including armed officers in schools, better security training, better staff support, better mental health support. You guys mentioned red flags this morning with David French's piece. You could do that. But Congress, particularly the Democrats, want an all or nothing approach that includes massive gun control, Republicans will never go along with. You used to be able to have the art of the deal in Washington, and now both sides like to let their problems fester to run on, whether it's Republicans with immigration or Democrats with guns.

No, I mean, look, I think there's a lot of contextual support for the argument that you make. I mean, we've seen Democrats do this again and again. I think that's what Democrats are doing on immigration. I think that's what Republicans are doing on immigration. There's a deal to be had on immigration for sure, and both sides have decided that it's much better to not have a deal on immigration so that they can keep making the case to their base. I do think that you're right, that it's true on guns as well. I guess I'm, I do think there are. You're frustrated though. Yeah, it's frustrating. And I do think there are Democrats.

I mean, look, I think that you just listen to some of these Democrats or you listen to some of these gun control activists, you know, who I don't typically find myself agreeing with on on policy questions, you know, particularly people have lost kids in Sandy Hook and these other things. And I think some of them want a solution. Some of them would be willing to sit down and actually have a discussion about this. And it's just so painful. It is the idea that we are having this again, that the majority leader in the Senate is already saying, like, nothing is going to happen. I don't know what should happen. I really don't. I don't know what should happen. I really don't know what should happen. And I hate legislating to solve the do-something

problem because usually when you legislate to solve the do-something problem, you do something and it's not the right thing. But boy, I wish we could just have a conversation. The Everett-Durkson quote, there are two parties in Washington, the stupid party and the evil party, they get together and do something stupid and evil, and the press says it's bipartisan. Right, right. You, you, it's attributed to him. I don't know what there is to him. But yet, look, If you got people together in a room, the biggest problem and frustration I have with Washington on both sides now is that instead of writing a one-page bill, they want to write a thousand-page bill. You could write a one-page bill and say, can we all agree on this one thing? And you can, except both sides have talked themselves out of being able to legislate that way. Can we pay for training and additional security at schools in the country? Let's just do this one thing. Okay, we've done that. Now, can we increase mental?

health. Now let's get into the gun issue. Can we increase the age of ownership for rifles to 21 from 18? Do each of those things as opposed to doing a comprehensive bill. Comprehensivism is what's killed Washington. Right. And I look, I think part of the problem is everybody is looking for a panacea and there is no panacea. It's not that we won't have a, it won't be a solution, quote unquote, to the problem that we face. But I think it is worth at least having the conversations exploring some of these possibilities. I mean, I've, I guess I'm increasingly skeptical of, of arming guards and police officers at the schools.

I don't know what the right solution is, but, you know, this guy was confronted by armed law enforcement officials before he got into the school yesterday, and he made it, and he did everything he did anyway. I think that can be part of the solution to this, particularly if there's, you know, if there's some back and forth. But I think it is dangerous, even in the aftermath of something as horrific as what we saw yesterday to believe that there's a panacea. The only thing I can hope for is that people will actually have a real good faith

conversation about it. Yeah, I hope they will. But in the political environment where we're in a really are a 50-50 nation and you've got a party trying to hold on to power with the headwinds against them, it's going to be very hard for them not to try to demagogue this issue as opposed to solving the issue. I think you're right. Eric, thanks for taking the time after such a big day. On so little sleep, I know you were working into the wee hours of the morning and then had to get up very early.

We appreciate you sounded remarkably coherent this morning for your lack of sleep. Everybody go out and subscribe to his newsletter, of course, which I mentioned earlier, and listen to him on the podcast. Thanks again. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race.

Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. In his newsletter this morning, Eric Erickson analyzed the Georgia election results under the headline Trump's 2,000 mules got stuck in Georgia clay. It's a pretty clever headline, but it requires you to know what he means by 2,000 mules. 2,000 mules was a film, supposed documentary film produced by Dinesh D'Souza,

conservative author, provocateur, purveyor of falsehoods. And we are lucky enough to have Kai Himmellman from the dispatch staff, one of our fact-checkers here to talk to us about 2,000 mules, which she spent a good bit of time. I think it's fair to say fact-checking and reporting out. Kyle, welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me. How to be here.

Of course. So big picture question, we have now, you have been focused on bogus election claims for, I mean, we're honestly going on like the better part of two years here, almost two years. You've debunked virtually every one that people have made at one time or another. How many new claims are in this film, and what's the basic thrust of the movie? What's the point Dinesh D'Souza is trying to make by releasing this film? So he definitely recycles a bunch of claims. I mean, the biggest claim here is that there's this elaborate network of ballot traffickers that have

harvested enough ballots to change the results of the 2020 election. What he does very well here is, you know, he makes it look really credible because he uses a lot of graphics, he uses a lot of numbers that look good. He uses this, you know, data from True the Vote, which is this conservative organization. He uses geolocation data, which is actually, you know, real seeming data. you can buy geolocation data. Can you explain what is geolocation data? Yeah, sure. So you can buy this data from cell phone companies.

And it's data, you know, on your cell phone companies collect this data. If you have your, you know, location services on, it'll track, you know, where you are, you know, based on your location services. So Dinesh, D'Souza, and true the vote claim that they're able to track where these ballot traffickers went, how many times they were, you know, how many times they went to ballot ballot box, ballot drawboxes. But, you know, in reality, you can actually tell, you know, if they went to exact drop boxes. You can tell maybe, you know, in where you were in the vicinity of a Dropbox, but you're not able to distinguish if you, you know, if you went to a Starbucks next to a Dropbox or if you went to an actual Dropbox, there's really no way to distinguish this.

But if you have a lot of graphics and you have someone telling you this and you're not really able to distinguish, you know, between these facts, how would you know? So the movie is really for people who probably don't want to know the facts, who probably are watching this movie and are saying, you know, I think the election is stolen. And, you know, it's done really well. This is how good conspiracy theories are made. They're sort of cloaked in these quarter, not even quarter truths, but like things that resemble a little bit of truth.

Yeah, I mean, geolocation data sounds really fancy. I hear that and I say, wow, that sounds like they can isolate where this particular person was at this particular moment. But as you point out, if I go to McDonald's and get a quarter-pounder and the McDonald's is next to the dry cleaners, you can't very well say that I've been to the dry clean. And that's in effect what they're trying to do is they count repeat trips to not to the drop boxes themselves, but to the vicinity of the drop boxes, which are, it's important to point out, located in very convenient places on purpose, like places where people would be going to make it easy for people to drop ballots and then make the claim sort of leap from

there using some selective video at certain drop boxes, suggesting that this was an effort to harvest ballots, falsify them, and steal the election. Is that a fair summary? Yes. And the other thing they do is they have this surveillance footage of footage around the drop. boxes, which, you know, they got from a public records request. And they say, you know, we have the footage of people going to the drop boxes multiple times. However, one of the biggest holes in the movie is they only show these ballot traffickers going to the drawboxes one time. They don't show anyone going there more than once. So we're asked as audience members to just sort of believe them. Right. The claim is, I mean, I think there are two problems with that. And there's a very

important one. I'm glad you brought it up. You know, on the one hand, the problem is they have surveillance footage from, you know, a drop box or a couple drop boxes. They do not have video surveillance footage from all of the drop boxes or even many of the drop boxes. They're, by definition, they're taking, they're very selectively taking this video footage. But as you point out, if it were the case that you have video surveillance of even these selections, drop boxes. And it's the case, as they suggest in the movie, that many of these so-called mules keep coming back again and again and again.

You would think that they ought to be in a position to show us those repeat visits from those mules to establish the claim that they're making. But they don't do that. Is that because they don't have the footage and these mules, in fact, did come? Or is it because they don't actually, can't actually prove that the mules came again and again and again? Yeah, it seems like it's probably the latter. You know, the other thing that Dinesh doesn't really address is that ballot harvesting is legal in a lot of states. And, you know, can you define ballot harvesting for us? Yeah. So ballot harvesting is when a third party collects

and returns a completed ballot on behalf of a voter, an absentee ballot on behalf of the voter. And this is allowed in a lot of states. And this is something he doesn't really talk about. He makes it seem like it's a completely shady practice when it's, you know, it's completely allowed in a lot of states. And something else he doesn't really address as that even in a sense, state where ballot harvesting is illegal. If the ballot was completely untampered with was signed and sealed, the ballot itself would still count, would still be legal, even if it was

illegally harvested. So these are just these details that he doesn't really mention that are, you know, they're very important. Inconvenient to the case he's making, but important if you want to understand reality. Beyond sort of his omissions and inferential treatment of the facts and the narrative, there are some cases in which they made claims that are just not true. There's a claim in the movie subject to some scrutiny by reporting from NPR that true the vote by using this geolocation data actually helped solve a murder. in Atlanta. Did that happen?

No, this didn't happen. They, you know, they called this a murder case, a cold case that very much was not. I think the case was in 2021, if I'm not mistaken, that had absolutely nothing to do with True the Vote. They never said explicitly. I think they were very careful with the language. but the implication was that they, you know, they turned their geolocation data over to the FBI, and they had a hand in helping solve the murder that, you know, was ebbing on a cold case, is what they said.

And then eventually NPR reported that, you know, they acknowledged that, you know, they had nothing to do with it. But in the movie that- True, the vote acknowledged that they had nothing to do. Because the suspects in the case had either turned themselves in or been apprehended before True the vote ever provided. this supposed crucial information. Totally. And they had nothing, nothing to do with it. And something else interesting

that the Washington Post reported on, some of the geolocation data, they mapped it out in the movie. They used these graphics of maps showing the geolocation data. One of the maps that they use actually turned out, they said it was a map of Atlanta, turned out that the map was this stock

photo. It was a map of Moscow, which is pretty funny. And Moscow, wait, I'm just, just because you're the fact checker, Moscow and Atlanta are not the same cities? No, not the same. I did check that. And, you know, it's interesting. This is actually something that Mike Lindell did in his movies also. He had... He's the MyPillow CEO who's been arguably the most prominent purveyor of misinformation related the election in the country with the exception of Donald Trump. Yes, exactly. And he uses the same exact methodology that Dinesh uses, which is he has all these graphics,

these very flashy graphics in all of his movies. And, you know, they're very fast moving and you can't really tell what they are. But if you zoom in a little, you'll see that they have absolutely nothing to do with anything. In Michael Lindell's case, he had these graphics. They were just numbers. And if you, you know, you zoom in, you see that they were just numbers, plain numbers. And if you ask him about it, they were like, oh, they were just representative of something that we were going to, like, fill in later. And it's very much, you know, the same thing that Dinesh does in his movie.

And it's a smart tactic because, you know, you can fool a lot of viewers into thinking that maybe the viewers are too stupid to understand. Or not even stupid. I mean, let me stick up for the, for the viewers here. I mean, I know people who are sort of taken in by efforts like D'Souza's, efforts like Mike Lindell's and others. And look, if you come to this, if you're not a fact checker and you don't have the liberty of spending two years really researching this, talking to experts and establishing your own expertise, let's say you, you know, you work, you're a pharmacist and you work 60 hours a week and you've got a family and you're busy, you can't afford to go and chase all this stuff. down. And if you came into the election believing that Donald Trump was likely to win, you saw on election night that Donald Trump was doing well in all these states that he later claims were stolen, you can imagine how somebody, you know, who's not stupid, somebody who's smart and intelligent,

but isn't sort of a political obsessive might say, I want to find out more about this. And they tuned to somebody that they believe, whether it's, I mean, I don't think people would necessarily first go to Mike Lindell the pillow guy as the person that they would trust as an expert on elections. But they might, you know, look to somebody on newsmax or what have you to explain to them why what they thought was going to happen didn't, in fact, happen, particularly as Donald Trump is, you know, starting on election night, going on and on about the election have been stolen, his raids having, his leads having been erased overnight. And, you know, I would say, unfortunately, most of the Republican Party in those days and weeks after the election,

either directly validating Trump's concerns or complaints, or in some cases, indirectly validating those concerns and complaints by saying repeatedly, well, he's entitled to the process, he's entitled to the process, he's entitled to the process. So you can, it's not entirely surprising to me that we have half of the Republican Party. It's actually, I think, more than half in some polls who think the election wasn't legitimate in a way that I think it's very well established that it's legitimate. But, you know, for somebody like that, you can see where they are accustomed to taking things in from television if they've long trusted Fox News or Newsmax or what have you. And you see it presented on television. It has sort of

an official feel to it that it wouldn't. Yeah. And it sounds to me like like you're saying they exploit that sort of assumption. Yeah. I mean, even someone like me, like I've been doing this for a while and when I watched this movie, I mean, I have a, you know, I have a pretty good sense that the election wasn't stolen, but I saw this movie. And it was not an easy movie to fact check. I saw the geolocation data. I didn't really know. I wasn't like, oh, this is going to be an easy thing to fact check. I really had to do my research. I had to talk to people. I didn't know anything about geolocation data. I wasn't like, oh, the election was stolen, but I was like,

Okay, I can understand why this would trip someone up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was well done. Like, he did a really good job. But it's important, I mean, it's important that you take that approach to it, I think. I mean, you have to sort of start with the idea, I'd say, you know, not only on a film like 2000 mules, even though you know Dinesh D'Souza's recent history is full of this kind of inflammatory stuff that doesn't check out, you know, I think it's important to take the approach that, you know what, this could be true.

Let me approach this like somebody who's watching this and might think it's true. And then let me go and scrutinize the, you know, the individual claims that are made. I mean, it's interesting to hear you say that it was hard to fact check. I mean, that was what one of the things we struggled with when we worked on fact-checking Tucker Carlson's Patriot Purge documentary is they, you know, the people who put these things together are doing so as often as not. not with an understanding that their narrative will be more persuasive, probably the fewer discrete factual errors are in it. So in some cases, they actually avoid making strictly factual claims so that you can't say they were wrong about these 13 claims in the movie.

And instead, you're left, you know, we don't, we try very hard at the dispatch. We don't fact-check opinion. You can't fact-check somebody's opinion. You have to fact-check facts. It's a mistake I think that some other fact-checkers don't aren't as careful about. They do end up fact-checking opinion. We make a point not to do that. But it is hard when so much of it is inference and supposition and, you know, filling in the gaps between actual events, they'll start with a discrete fact that is true and then reason from their, you know, all different directions to make claims that, or not make claims to make suggestions and hints about things that aren't true. And that, I think, is the real challenge. How do you address that? When you sit down for something like this, like you can't fact-check things that are opinion. You can't fact-check things that they want you to believe, but never claim how do you handle that yeah it's um it's challenging you kind of have to like fact check around it i mean i think about how i approach mike lindell's films and i i think i'm like the only person

in the entire world who watch like all 19 of those films and this is such it's amazing you haven't come to us for hazard pay on those um this is such a more um clever film than that that was such a that was an easier task in so many more ways. Yeah, Dinesh D'Souza is a very smart person. And what he does, which is very smart, is true the vote, Greg Phillips and Catherine Englebrot. They are excellent representatives of excellent spokespeople for this film. They are super articulate.

They look really good. They sound really smart. It is like the perfect, he's very good. at conspiracy theory. Mike Lindell, less so. You know, there's a lot of holes and he just, he comes straight out with bad, you know, bad facts. Dinesh and this team, yeah, he does exactly as you described. So I guess my approach here is contextualizing everything and I guess being very careful about calling things, you know, absolutely, you know, true or false. I mean, I think it's putting things into context, explaining how they got to, you know, contextualizing

things and letting, letting readers know, like, how some things may be a little true, but why, you know, it's still, it's not, it's not right, but putting things into context, I guess. Well, you did a terrific job on this, as with your other fact checks for us. And we thank you for coming on to talk about it. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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