Gerald Butts
speaker
1,669 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
I don't think so, and I'll tell you why.
I think that the position that Charlie Kirk occupied is an incredibly interesting and important one.
And if your listeners have not read it, I would certainly commend Justin Ling's Substack describing who Charlie Kirk was and why he was particularly important.
But from my perspective, as someone who's been involved in running probably more than my share of campaigns, and I think, James, you would agree with this,
That one of the most underappreciated valuable assets in a campaign is grassroots organization.
Right.
And one of the reasons I was, as it turned out, overly optimistic about the chances of Trump losing the the election last year was because I looked at the organizational heft of the Republican Party and I said, how are they going to win this?
a poll by poll battle in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona.
Charlie Kirk showed up with that organization.
He built that organization and he was able to hold together a really unstable molecule.
James, you've talked about this many times in the past about your own party that you have to create this comfortable zone for a to absorb and render
not less than harmful, extreme views.
Right.
And Charlie Kirk figured out a way to obviously not successfully in the long run, but to take what had been seen to be fringe views and absorb them within a more mainstream Republican movement.
And I say all that from
Looking at it as an observer from the Canadian perspective, of course, all of these views would seem relatively extreme in the Canadian context.
But he was a really important figure and he brought the digital, modern digital organizational techniques to the Republican Party.
And it was difficult for him, ultimately, I think, to render the rhetorical posture he had to strike in order to recruit these people anodyne.
And in the end, it kind of got away from him.
It's the Victor Frankenstein and his creatures parable yet again.
Showing 661–680 of 1,669 · page 34 of 84
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