WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: Trump Wins the Election

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

This week we discuss the recent election results, and social media's surprising reaction to them.Tune in to hear about all the people who are going to die when Trump takes office, a typical Garrett grocery store trip, and us actively discussing what our next episode will be about. 

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM where we examine the truth disparity between what's in social media and what's actually true. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gouldsby. And you probably could guess what we're talking about today. Probably. I mean, some sort of big event happened this week. And it's the election of the president of the United States. And as you could probably tell if you're at all on social media, people online have a lot to say about this.

This does not surprise me in the slightest. And a lot of it is the same. And I think I'm actually going to be able to distill a lot of the narratives into some key camps and then talk about some examples of things that I found that were particularly troubling, actually. Well, please give us your camps. I think you'll enjoy hearing what social media has to say. I want to start by addressing something that happens every single election cycle. It happened.

I remember it happening in 2016 when Trump was first elected. And I'm watching it happen again now, which is this strange. of people on social media posting if you voted for him and you are part of the reason that he is president now, please unfollow me, please do not be my friend anymore or do not interact with me in any capacity.

There's a lot of I hate you on a personal level now because of the outcome of this election. I do not believe that these posts would have circulated obviously had Kamala been named president because I don't think people would have cared who you voted for if they would have won.

You know what I mean? They care because they didn't win. I feel like that's obvious, but it's also partially not obvious because it's, it's not like a real moral conviction they have. But it's like, it's like, it's, the hate they have is. Oh, yeah. It's definitely like if you did this, unfollow me, block me. You are no longer connected to me in any capacity. Like we are no longer, like, pure rage in response to losing, not necessarily. Because this has been a cycle for a long time. These posts would have circulated earlier, right? If you, if this was like coming from a genuine place of like, I hate all you guys. I think it is just kind of a sore loser sort of thing. Not the conservatives have been good winners or good losers by any mean. I mean, we definitely were some sore losers last time, and I am happy to say that. But this election specifically is a lot of like, I don't like you. I'm worried for my life.

We'll hop into that now, actually. So much of social media right now is like, I am worried for my life. I'm worried for the lives of my friends. For your life? My life. It's always my life. What, did they give a reasoning for why? afraid for their life.

No. When they say these things, it's always just point blank, I'm afraid for my life. And then if you dig a little deeper or you go into the comments where people are asking questions about being like, why do you think your life is in danger? The answers are in a couple different camps. The first camp being women, women saying that their lives are in danger because of abortion laws. I believe the implication would be that they are going to die if they can't have an abortion. or their lives, or they could be meaning it in a more metaphorical sense of like the lives they planned for themselves are at stake. Because they may be forced to have children. They don't say it like that though.

They do say it like they're actually going to die. Another camp is like any sort of bi-pac LGBTQ plus group believes that the legislation from Trump put a pin in that, Trump in quotes, is going to, to damage their ability to live. And the quote is, like, exacerbate inequalities that already exist. So, like, the idea of, I don't know how that would kill them, but, I mean, there are,

there seems to be a consensus that that would lead to deaths of minority groups. So it sounds like they want to make him like Hitler. Like, they're like, he's going to exterminate people. They've been doing this for a long time. There's a lot of, like, Trump Hitler. Maybe I should, we can talk about that.

We can talk about that. We can talk about that. It's not really Trump, though. that they're pointing to, because I don't think they really know his policy. I don't really know his policy. I'm being completely honest with you. This social media is really one-dimensional in the way that they talk about candidates. They're talking about Project 2025, specifically, which social media is very clear that Trump has denounced.

Every post you see that's like, Project 2025 is bad. Some of the top comments are typically Trump has denounced 2025. Trump has said he's not going to use Project 2025. I know what Project 2025 is. It's a Heritage Foundation project where they're trying to staff the White House once Trump is in office with vetted conservatives, is the idea there. And some of their policies that they, I guess, uses criteria for vetting these candidates or just have put forth as what they're interested in are things about abortion, IVF.

It's really unpopular with, obviously, anybody on the left. but there's a lot of like Project 2025 is going to do this and therefore Trump is going to do this which I think is pretty I think that's a pretty reasonable fear because I think if people were doing this on the other side people who are conservative would also be really afraid and would be very scared of that sort of thing

so there's a lot of that and then the last one that I found for reasons that they think their lives are in danger is Trump's sort of plan to like ban puberty blockers from young children, and they think that those kids will effectively end their own lives if they're not able to go on these hormones. So those are like the three reasons I've found on social media, and that actually took digging because the bulk of it is just my life is at stake,

and you have to really go through social media and be like, what are you guys talking about, though? Like, what is it? I want to mention that there are a couple different Twitter threads I've run into of people saying that there's no way that Trump won this election and here's why. there's plenty of counter-t Twitter threads that are like absolutely Trump won the election for XYZ reason but I do think it's really interesting because people are like she raised over a billion dollars

they're saying fewer people voted in this election than the last one so all of these things together make it look like maybe they didn't count all the votes maybe Commonwealth was supposed to have more votes and there were all these people that were supporting her that didn't come out to vote even though they were super gung-ho about it I would say that probably

what happened there is social media people are so chronically online that they think that because the dominant media narrative is one thing, that that means it's the narrative of the whole country. But social media is not a representative sample by any means. And we've learned that over the course of this show pretty significantly. There was a really funny Twitter thread I found where it was like, it basically said like green voters as in like the green party in Virginia literally did exactly what you wanted them not to do. and it shows this screenshot of Donald Trump ahead by like 22,000, and then underneath it, it says Jill Stein has 23,000 votes. And so the implication there is like if all these people

from the Green Party had just voted for Kamala, she would have been ahead. Trouble is Trump actually lost Virginia. So it's a completely useless screenshot. I think people are really just looking for people to blame. People want there to be, people want to be mad because they went out and voted and they thought they did their civic duty and they did, but it didn't go the way that they wanted it to. So they were trying to pin it on either the Green Party, independence, libertarian party, that sort of thing. But I thought that that threat was really funny

because it's like, green voters and Virginia literally did the meme. And then it's like, well, he didn't win. So did they actually, like, what is the benefit there? And there's plenty of people responding to that tweet being like, she didn't. She literally won Virginia like, you're fine. The other narrative, this is actually, I think, pretty, this is positive for social

media. I will say, this is the last thing I'm going to say, this is partially probably because of my personal algorithm. I will say that I'm happy to lay alike on the things that I see that I'm like, yeah, this is thoughtful and nuanced and I like it. And so they're probably showing me more of that stuff on purpose. I'm sure other people out there are getting a lot of like really one-sided stuff that's feeding their egos in some regard. This one's feeding mine because it's just a really, I like it. There's a reductive narrative that's going around that basically says like 90% of the country is bigoted, racist, and hateful.

That's the idea. It's like, okay, so let's say Trump did win, fair and square, there's no tampering. It just means the whole country's racist. It just means the whole country is bigoted. It just means the whole country hates minority groups. And there has been a lot of backlash to that idea because it was really popular to post that the day after the election. and in the day after that,

I guess it's only really been 48 hours or so, maybe 72. But 72, is that right? 48, 72? Tuesday. Man, I'm losing my mind. It's been really nice to see people kind of come back and be like, if we think this way,

if we live this way, like nothing's ever going to get done. Democrats will never win. And even people that are Democrats being like, I'm a Democrat and we're never going to win if we keep saying things like this, because this is not a way to characterize a whole group of people. And if that many people really did vote for Trump, we have to assume that they're not those things because they're in such a majority of them. There's got to be something else they see in this guy that we don't see or some other reason they're voting for him or some sort of deficit on our part that they cannot get behind in spite of these things. I also saw some pretty interesting tweet that were like people being like, how could you vote against, like it's the same sort of thing like you're voting against my life, you're voting against my rights, my, my, my, you are voting against me.

and people coming in and being like, why would you expect people to vote for your identity? And there's a lot of that conversation too that's like, you guys are forgetting that people have to vote for their livelihood and their like hierarchy of needs first is not like identity politics. It's definitely more base level needs and requirements

and social identity is more of a privilege to be able to consider. So social media has been a really interesting place, a lot of debates, but I've been seeing a lot of good back and forth. It's not all one thing or all another, because I think a lot more people are weighing in on this conversation than maybe we're used to. In terms of actual results, I got nothing, dude.

I have no idea. I know he won like $295 maybe electoral college votes. I know it was kind of what I think is more of a landslide. He won like five of the seven swing states. We saw that, but a lot of this is probably unfair because I had to do some collegian and radio stuff covering this. So I had some primary source stuff seeping in there. But generally the social media stuff is just.

just the narratives about, I hate you, you hate me. No, guys, we can't hate each other. And if I was going to sum it up, it could be that way. For those of you who are just tuning in on this lovely conversation on Radio Free Hillsdale, 1.1.7 FM. I'm Jillian. And I'm Garrett. And this is social mediators, and we're talking about the election.

Yeah. So let's go over some election results. Like you said, Trump won 295 electoral votes, which is a lot. He won the popular, or it appears that he is going to win the popular vote, still coming in, but by about 5 million votes. which is a pretty significant margin. And like you said, he won most of the swing states. Some are still being counted.

But the thing that was so different about this election is that Trump made enormous gains with groups that previously hated him. So let's talk about some of these numbers because when I read this, I was like, whoa. Like there's so many people that you would normally consider to be Democratic voters that went the other way in Drow.

The most notable ones is Trump was plus 13 points with Hispanic and Latinos, a vote that he lost by a significant margin in the last election. He was up seven points with 18 to 29 year old voters and eight points among people without college degrees. And he was also up by a lot with like blue collar workers, union workers. In fact, one of the things that Kamala in her campaign really failed to do was win the powerful unions to her side. There's a Reuters article out there about an interview with one of the leaders of these huge unions that trade union that's very important politically. And they just grilled Kamala. They sat down with her, talked to her, and they were like, you are not taking care of us. You know, we can't side with you.

And famously, for the first time in over 20 years, they didn't endorse a Democratic political candidate. It's been, I think, since 1996 that they, that was the last time they didn't endorse the Democratic candidate. So, landslide victory for Trump. Control of the House is still kind of up for grabs. The Senate went red, but the House will see. Mitch McConnell is stepping down. So the new speaker will either probably be, or Senate leadership, rather.

Sorry, I'm getting my things across. The new leader in the Senate is either going to be John Cornyn, who is representative from Texas. Nice. Or John Thune, who's the South Dakota representative. All right. So let's talk about another big kind of swing in the votes. This was back in the 2016 election where Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump. Miami-Dade County typically is considered pretty democratic.

It went for Hillary by 29-point margins. in 2016. That's huge. And Trump won it by 11 points. Wow. Yeah. So let's talk about maybe what are the policies, why did people vote the way they did. And it really comes down to two issues, economics and immigration. The immigration thing, Kamala just didn't address it as much in her campaign. She didn't see it.

It seems like when you examine her campaign that she didn't think it was going to be a big issue. And it turned out that for a very large percentage of voters, it was the issue. And Trump has a pretty stiff immigration policy. He wants to deport all these illegal immigrants, starting with all the criminals. There's all kinds of bans that he's going to place on all these loopholes that you see, like people getting into the U.S. and then having children and then they become U.S. citizens because they were born on U.S. soil. So he's trying to do away with a lot of these.

Now, here's, okay, here's the thing you have to realize is that Trump has made hundreds of different promise. to this, you know, to the effect of different immigration policy changes, a lot of the ones that Democrats are going to, like, really concerned about are probably never going to come to pass because some of them require constitutional amendment changes, right? So if you're freaking out, maybe don't yet, things actually have to happen, right? People can promise all kinds of things and they can want all kinds of things, and then there's the rubber meets the road, is it actually going to happen. And then the economy is the big one by far. people are incredibly dissatisfied with the economy currently.

In fact, I believe 80% of people polled said that they are currently openly angry with the way that the economy is being run right now under Joe Biden. Do we know what the problem is? Because I've heard that people are upset about it. The conversation on social media is very much like economy bad, Biden fault. But there's got to be more to it, right? Sure, sure, sure. inflation is the big thing, right? So because of Joe Biden's economic policies,

aka the government spending programs that he has put into place, whether it be environmental activism or social justice reforms or just the money he's doling out social security things, healthcare-related funding, anyways, he spent so much money

that now our money is worth very little money and the price of everything is going up really, really high because that's how inflation works. Awesome. Yeah. Sounds like fun. Yeah.

So not great. Lots of Americans are feeling quite pinched in the wallet. They're feeling pinched. And, you know, I can even just speak from my own experience. Like over the last four years, going to the grocery store just to buy basic things, everything is really expensive now. You know, you can go for a very small grocery run and you have a hard time spending less than $50. True.

Which used to get you quite a bit. Now it gets you, you know, like bread and milk and eggs and cheese. Yeah, like you're a French peasant in the country. You know, not to say that we have it that hard, but still, $50 doesn't get you very far nowadays. And that I think is telling for most people. Let's see, what else? Trump wants to add a tariff. Lots of people are afraid of this, this tariff idea.

Okay, so it's a 10 to 20% tariff on basically every foreign good that's not American made. That's what a foreign good is, but just thought we would clarify for the people. It's good to spell it out. Yeah. Sometimes people need that. So 10 to 20% tariff, and then a 60% tariff on anything made in China. So he's really coming after China in his economic policy. And he actually wants to ban trade, or not trade, investment between American companies and Chinese companies.

Whether that will actually happen is hard. It's hard to believe. Maybe it will happen. But here's the thing. The people that pull a lot of weight in Washington and in the power scheme writ large are the people that stand to gain a lot. these investments. So I don't know. That's just my my gloss on it. Don't take that for too much, but it would be, there's a lot of webs to untangle to ban all investments in China, right? And people on social media, by the way, are kind of talking about this sort of thing,

but in a really one-dimensional way, this is one area I think conservatives are failing majorly, is they're acting like, rather than Trump winning the presidency, God won everything. It's very much like, evil did not win is always the caption. It's like, evil did not win. And there's this one TikTok that I saw that I screenshoted for this that says not even 12 hours since he was reelected, which he's like, yeah, he's the president elected, but he's not quite

the president yet. It says Hamas is calling to end the war. Putin is willing to negotiate any of the war and China wants to exist peacefully with us. And I'm like there's no way you're not actually like you're not reducing this into something. I'm sure Putin wants to negotiate

ending the war where he wins and takes over Ukraine. Like I'm sure there's more information there besides the like five lines of text that I'm reading. But the reductive narrative is not just happening on the left. It's happening on the right too. Yes. And yeah, Trump, he wants to institute huge tax cuts and all these different economic things. So yeah, I think there is a temptation to see it as like, oh, yes, we won. Like morality will reign now. Let us not forget, okay, that we didn't, we were not picking between morals here for either of them. I'm not going to get into that whole can of worms,

but that is a really silly way to look at this election. Neither of them are incredibly moral human beings. No, yes. In fact, most people, I think, largely would consider them to be immoral human beings, maybe. Completely immoral. In fact, like, like, disproportionately so. So I'm just going to give you a really quick, why did Harris lose? The biggest thing, I think, is, one, she did not think economics was going to be as big an issue.

I don't think she sees the American economy as failing right now. which it's not failing, like, in a big sense, but it's failing, like, on the individual sense, like things are hard. To me. Yeah. And the other thing is that she kind of failed to separate herself from the current regime. People want something different.

They really, really need something different. And she just campaign-wise didn't make a conscious effort to say, like, I'm not Biden. Yeah. I'm not going to do it. He did. True. And I think that is where most people agree her.

big mistakes are. And so lots of people that would have normally voted for her, didn't vote for her, because they wanted something different. Yeah. And that makes sense to me. I don't think, unlike what social media is saying, I don't think she lost because she's a black woman. I really don't. And maybe she did. I don't know. I'm not the authority on this sort of thing, but is it actually beneficial to us to have this conversation about? Probably not. Yeah. I don't think it doesn't need to be good. Well, we need to do a whole separate episode on the Trump-Hitler comparison because there's a lot to unpack there. And ultimately, what we will unpack is that the comparison is not that good. Yeah, I kind of figured, but I'm down to do that.

So stay tuned, guys, if you're interested in that episode. Maybe. Maybe if we can find a way, I don't know. What does social media say about Hitler? A lot, and a lot about Trump, too, and a lot about them together. Are we ready to give it a really quick grade before we fight off for the week? Yeah. Okay.

Okay, three, two, one. B. Yeah, it did good. It did good. Yeah, I was pretty okay with it other than the one side of this. Yeah. I think this week because more people are like compelled to participate, they just voted, they're, they want their voices to be heard. There's a lot less like silent watching and a lot more actual contribution.

And I was okay with it. Some of the free thinking people decided to say something. Yes. And even if I don't agree with it what they said, I guess I'm glad they're saying it. In some regard, it's really trite, but that's how I feel. Thanks so much to everybody who tune in to our episode of the social media news on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM this week. We hope you enjoyed it and we'll talk to you next week.