Ryan Girdusky made comments offensive enough on Monday night to have potentially rendered his media career one of the “blink-and-you-might-miss-it” variety. As such, you might well be wondering—who exactly is he?
By way of quick recap, Girdusky was ignominiously booted off of CNN’s NewsNight With Abby Phillip yesterday after telling Muslim co-panelist Mehdi Hasan “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off” in response to Hasan’s oft-stated support for Palestinian civilians amid the ongoing war on Gaza.
Hasan has not publicly addressed the incident since the show aired last night, but he has reposted on X a statement by CNN confirming Girdusky “will not be welcomed back at our network.”
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For his part, Girdusky has tweeted that “you can stay on CNN if you falsely call every Republican a Nazi and have taken money from Qatar-funded media. Apparently you can’t go on CNN if you make a joke. I’m glad America gets to see what CNN stands for.”
The 37-year-old Girdusky is married and lives in Queens, New York.
He began is career in 2007 working for NYC councilwoman Helen Sears. He has also worked on campaigns for Michael Bloomberg and Bob Turner. From 2015-2017 he was a senior writer at Red Alert Politics. He also wrote the book They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the Nationalist Populist Revolution.
In the past, Girdusky has written stories for neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and made several appearances on a podcast hosted by Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right Proud Boys movement, as well as penning think-pieces criticising far-right former Trump adviser Stephen Miller for not working to more effectively implement an anti-Muslim legislative agenda.
It’s also not the first time Girdusky has made waves on Phillip’s show, having been pulled up by the CNN anchor earlier in October for suggesting the 2020 George Floyd riots “resulted in excess of over 15,000 black male deaths in this country.”
Known as the ‘Ferguson Effect’, the right-wing pundit’s comments drew on the idea, heavily disputed among academics, that protests against police brutality naturally lead to reduced proactive policing and therefore a sharp increase in violent crime.
Phillip and other panelists promptly shot back at Girdusky for “invent[ing] a connection between two things, just because you want that connection to be there.”
A New York native and proud Catholic, Girdusky has been working in politics since 2007, contributing to political campaigns for Republican figures like former Congressman Bob Turner and former NYC Councilwoman Helen Sears.
He also claims to have a close relationship with vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, and was a founder of the 1776 Project Political Action Committee, a super PAC committed to campaigning against the teaching of critical race theory in US schools and installing conservative figures on local school boards.
As a commentator and writer, he’s broken stories about allegations of sexual harassment against John Weaver, founder of The Lincoln Project, and published a book extolling the virtues of what he describes as a widespread “national populist revolt” against the “liberal democratic order.”
