The Trump Manifesto, Newsom's Bad Trump Cosplay & The Gerrymandering Lie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7B2Qatk5KA Good morning from a rainy Houston, Texas. It is Beth Guide, and welcome back to Talking Purple — where I try to make sense of common again, because lately, common sense feels like a lost language. Today's episode is a big one. Pull up a chair, grab the coffee, because we are unpacking the latest assassination attempt on President Trump, the manifesto that should be lighting up every parent's radar, the late-night comedians who have completely lost the plot, Gavin Newsom's failed Trump cosplay, the SD4 special election here in our backyard, and a deep dive into what gerrymandering actually is — not what the keyboard activists on your local school board Facebook page think it is. Buckle up. The Trump Assassination Attempt — And the Crowd Cheering for It Let's start with the elephant in the room. There was another assassination attempt on President Trump, this time at the Correspondents' Dinner. The shooter did not make it into the room, thank God. And immediately, the staged-event crowd started up again. Let me say this loud enough for the people in the back: nobody is packing up a gun, throwing away the rest of their life, and walking themselves into a federal prison cell for a staged event. That is not how this works. Use your head. What is flying under the radar — and shouldn't be — is that the alleged shooter is a teacher. A teacher. That means he has been in front of our kids, influencing students, day in and day out. That is a massive problem and we should be talking about it a whole lot more than we are. Then there is the manifesto. Three words: rapist, pedophile, traitor. And here is where I want to stop and have a real conversation, because if you actually believe the President of the United States is the second coming of Hitler, that he is molesting children, that he is selling out the country — I cannot fully blame somebody for thinking they need to take matters into their own hands. That is the logical end of believing those narratives. The problem is not the guy with the gun. The problem is the machine that convinced him those things were true. Let's go through the three accusations like grown-ups. Traitor. This comes from the Russia collusion story. That story has been debunked six times over. The minute they came back with hookers in a hotel room, common sense should have told everybody this was a put-up job. Smart people are still repeating it. Get out of the echo chamber and actually read both sides. Pedophile. This one rides on Epstein. Here is my common-sense test: if Trump was meaningfully implicated in the Epstein files, the Democrats would have released them the second they had the White House. They went down every legal road they could find — convicted felon, civil cases, the whole nine — because they did not have the goods. If they had Epstein-file dynamite on him, he would have been Prince Andrew'd long before he was a candidate, never mind a President. And by the way, the Democrats should be very careful what they wish for on Epstein, because I suspect there are more of theirs in there than ours. Just look at how fast Eric Swalwell's situation got weaponized the moment he was inconvenient. Rapist. I had to look this one up myself. The alleged incident was supposedly between 1996 and 2002. From 1996 to 2022 — twenty-six years — Trump was on Home Alone, on Bones, on every TV show in America. Not a peep. Then a civil trial, a judge who said the charges were "similar," and George Stephanopoulos running it down the field on national television. ABC was forced to pay out a heap of money for that little stunt. That is libel money, folks. That is not vindication of the claim — that is a judgment that ABC said something untrue. But these accusations get plugged into the social media algorithm and repeated until they become "the truth." That is how you end up with an educated teacher pulling a trigger. The Reverse Psychology the Left Isn't Considering I want to say something to the TikTok crowd cheering that the shooter missed. There has never been a single political figure in this country I have wished dead. Not one. But here is the thing the left isn't thinking through — every single president who has ever been assassinated became a martyr. Reagan got the favorable treatment. JFK. Lincoln. If something ever did happen to Trump, all you would do is cement his mystique forever. Maybe think that one through before the next post. Late-Night Comedy, The View, and the Slow-Motion Cultural Suicide I don't usually do pop culture. But the late-night comedians have stopped being comedians. Jimmy Kimmel is so far into Trump Derangement Syndrome he is making jokes about the First Lady looking like a widow. There is nothing funny about wishing somebody's spouse dead. Nothing. If the ratings are bad, take the show off the air. Don't watch it. Same with The View. Whoopi Goldberg used to be able to articulate the left side of an argument better than almost anybody on television, and I respected her for that. She has gone off the deep end. Joy Behar is in another zip code entirely. Know what you believe and be able to defend it. If you can do that, you can have a real conversation. This hyperbolic name-calling approach is destroying the fabric of the country. Gavin Newsom Is Doing Trump Karaoke — Badly I do not like Gavin Newsom. Every time I see the man I think of the wooden Santa Claus from the Tim Allen movie — the sprayed-on hair, the whole deal. Lately he is trying to cosplay Trump. Calling people lazy. Calling people sleepy. Sir, you don't have the chops. People do not like Trump because he calls Joe Biden "Sleepy Joe." That's a flourish, not the substance. People like Trump because of the policy — America First, citizens first, putting our own house in order. Newsom thinks the appeal is the insult. It isn't. It's a New York bravado, and California does not have New York bravado. I should know — I have one, and I can tell you it doesn't translate west of the Hudson without a lot of practice. If you actually want to win those voters, Gavin, try talking about putting Americans first. Try talking about families first. Try talking about why we're mutilating children in the name of progress. Try the policy. The voice is not the brand. "Book Banning" Is Curating a Library Quick segue, because this connects to everything else. We have committees in Texas reviewing books for school libraries — the ones that are sexually graphic, the ones with no educational value. The left is calling this book banning. It is not book banning. It is curating a library for a specific purpose. If I'm building a law library, I'm not putting in a recipe book. That is not a ban — that is a librarian doing her job. Call things what they actually are. We have a really bad habit in this country of being hyperbolic about everything, and it makes us look crass. SD4 — Get Out and Vote, Houston and Montgomery County Tomorrow is election day in Senate District 4. We have Brett, the DA from Montgomery County, running to replace the seat that opened up when our previous senator left for the chancellorship at Texas Tech. SD4 is roughly 90 percent red. In a low-turnout special election, the most committed side wins. Get out and vote. We have a serious flooding problem in Kingwood. Brett has come in, learned the issues, and is working with elected officials on both sides of the aisle — including the Democratic mayor of Houston — to get a real flood mitigation plan moving. He is strong on crime. He understands the district. Go vote. And Now — Gerrymandering. What It Actually Is. Here's where I want to spend the rest of our time, because somebody on a Facebook post the other day told me she lives in a "gerrymandered district" because she's a blue voter and her senator is going to be red. That is not what gerrymandering means. Let me show you what gerrymandering really looks like — using my own zip code. Exhibit A: Kingwood, Texas I live in Kingwood. Kingwood was built by Exxon Mobil for its executives in the 80s and early 90s. Add in the United/Continental Airlines families and a few Shell people, and you've got the demographic. Engineers, executives, upper-tier professionals. In 1994, the City of Houston annexed us. Why? Because we had no crime, which meant no infrastructure investment, which meant high tax revenue with almost no spending. They had already done the same thing with the other Exxon enclave — Clear Lake — which is a full hour south of me, down where NASA is. But to give us a Houston City Council seat, the districts had to be contiguous. So they connected Kingwood and Clear Lake — these two upper-crust, white-collar Republican enclaves an hour and a half apart — through a single stream of water. One stream. That was the contiguous boundary. Why? Because they did not want to add two more Republican seats to Houston City Council. So they stuffed all the Exxon executives, the Continental Airlines families, the engineers, the rocket scientists from NASA, and everybody in Kingwood into ONE district and gave us ONE councilman. That, my friends, is gerrymandering. That is the textbook definition. And nobody has touched it since 1994. Exhibit B: SD4 Is Not Gerrymandered Now contrast that with SD4. The district runs from Harris County through Montgomery County, Chambers County, Jefferson County, and Galveston County. Five counties. It includes Port Arthur. It includes Beaumont. It is racially diverse. It is geographically enormous — almost a hundred-mile drive from end to end. There is no like-minded clustering. It just happens to lean heavily red because the population in those five counties leans red. That is not gerrymandering. That is geography. Exhibit C: The Eight Goose-Egg States Here is where it gets interesting. There are eight states with zero Republican members of the House of Representatives: Massachusetts (36 percent Republican population). Connecticut (42 percent). Maine (46 percent). New Hampshire (48 percent). Rhode Island (42 percent). Vermont (32 percent). Hawaii (38 percent). Delaware (42 percent). Now, some of these I get. Vermont and Delaware each have one congressional seat — if you're losing 58-42 statewide, you lose the one seat. Fine. Hawaii has two. Okay. But Massachusetts has nine House seats and 36 percent of the state is Republican. Where is the math on that? Connecticut, 42 percent Republican, zero seats. New Hampshire, 48 percent Republican, zero seats. If those lines were drawn by geography instead of by political concentration, you would have a 60-40 or even a 70-30 split. Not a 100-0 wipeout. Make no mistake — Democrats are drawing those lines. They are slicing and dicing voters by demographic and concentration to guarantee no Republican can win, anywhere, ever. That is gerrymandering. That is the real thing. Compare that to Pennsylvania, which has only 12 percent independents and is split 9-8 in the House. That is a state drawing lines like an honest broker. New York is 14-10. Reasonable. But Massachusetts? Connecticut? Those are political maps drawn with a butcher knife. Exhibit D: The Harris County Commissioners Court Stunt A few years ago, our Republican-led Commissioners Court here in Harris County pulled their own move. They had two Republican commissioners in red districts. They literally swapped which districts those two commissioners represented — meaning the guy I was used to voting for got moved off my area, and a guy I had never voted for got dropped onto me, while the original guy had to run for re-election in a district where nobody knew his name. That's how Lesley Briones picked up her seat. The Republicans handed it to her by playing musical chairs with their own incumbents. So when I tell you both parties do this — yes, both parties do this. The Republican Commissioners Court did it to themselves. The Supreme Court Just Did Something Sensible Thank God somebody has some sense. The Supreme Court just ruled that you cannot draw congressional districts based on race or demographic clustering. You draw them by geography. By zip code. By population. Everybody is screaming about the Voting Rights Act. It is 2026. There is not one single American legally in this country who is being prevented from voting. I was born in 1966. I am Gen X. We are the first generation that never lived a single day under segregation. We never saw a "whites only" bathroom. The 1950s norms people are still arguing about — they are not here. They have not been here for my entire life. Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: when you ball minorities together into one district to maximize Democrat seats, what you have actually done is concentrate poverty into one district that gets ignored for 50 years. Look at Sheila Jackson Lee's old district. The schools are bad. The crime is bad. The neighborhoods have been neglected for half a century. Why? Because once the seat is "safe," nobody has to fight for it. Nobody has to deliver. The district becomes a vote-harvest machine. If you mix those neighborhoods into broader geographic districts, you get all boats rising. Better representation. Better infrastructure. Better schools. Real competition. But you have to ask yourself the uncomfortable question: do the people in power actually want all boats to rise? Or is the current arrangement — concentrated poverty, locked-in Democrat seats, no accountability — exactly the system they want? The Bigger Picture I'm going to leave you with this. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar in 1917 with no plan for what came next. Millions died. We don't teach the Stalins and the Pol Pots in school anymore, and we should. Because what social media is doing right now — the manifestos, the rage clips, the algorithmic radicalization, the labels of pedophile-rapist-traitor pasted onto a sitting president — is the same kindling. Different century, same fire. We have to figure out how to ratchet this back. The red team is not as good at this game as the blue team. But the blue team has to ask themselves: what is the end goal? A handful of red states and a handful of blue states? A nation split in half? Because that is the trajectory. Know what you believe. Be able to articulate it. Stop the group-think. Stop the labels. And for the love of God, go vote tomorrow if you're in SD4. This is Beth Guide. I want to make sense of common again. You all have a good week, and I will talk to you soon.  Talking Purple is a podcast for people who are sick of the screaming on both sides. Subscribe, share, and join the conversation. For political campaign services — SEO, bulk email and texting, voter data across Texas — visit TalkingPurple.com Read the full article