The Erick Erickson Show

Erick Erickson devotes the hour to Greta Gerwig's new Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with The Magician's Nephew, and the decision to have Meryl Streep voice Aslan. He walks through why Aslan is C.S. Lewis's Christ figure, from the stone table in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, and argues that one small change guts the entire Christian allegory even if the movie sells tickets. He also defends Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey against critics on the right, and closes with a personal tribute to Dauvey Eisner.

Erick Erickson turns his equal opportunity offending on the left, taking apart Congressman Thomas Massie's House floor claim that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, and arguing that what happened was a war Hamas started on October 7th, not a genocide. He walks through the New York Times piece on Israel viewing itself as a victim, the Macklemore antisemitism fight that got the rapper booted from Robert Kraft's Gillette Stadium and left Ed Sheeran's tour in limbo, and the Ms. Rachel YouTube backlash, then makes the theological argument that antisemitism comes from the devil and that no Christian can hate the Jews. He closes the hour on Constitution Day with a defense of compromise, federalism and gridlock, plus breaking news on a proposed U.S. Army base in Poland and Marco Rubio's new round of Cuba sanctions.

Erick names the names. He walks through his newsletter on Charles Haywood, the shampoo magnate turned self described would be warlord whose money runs through the Claremont Institute, the Society for American Civic Renewal, American Reformer, New Founding and American Moment, and who is funding a push into the Southern Baptist Convention, the PCA and the Global Methodist Church. Then the economy turns ugly: oil over $100 a barrel, diesel near $6.22 a gallon, and a Federal Reserve under Kevin Warsh widely expected to raise interest rates.

Erick breaks down the numbers in the Georgia governor race, where Republican Rick Jackson has reserved $40.5 million in ad time against Keisha Lance Bottoms and her $42,000, and calls Jackson's foster care and Atlanta riot spots the best political ads of the cycle. Then to Michigan, where Mike Rogers is sitting on opposition research that has Abdul El-Sayed in his own words saying the government overfunds breast cancer research, and to Texas and Florida, where James Talarico and Angie Nixon are handing Republicans the tape. Plus callers on Iran's enriched uranium buried under Pickaxe Mountain, why America cannot refine its own sweet crude, and Saudi Arabia firing a Chinese made Dongfeng missile in Yemen.

Breaking news opens the hour: the Federal Reserve under Chairman Kevin Warsh votes 12 to 0 to raise interest rates a quarter point, the first hike in more than three years, with the dot plot signaling another to come and the inflation target pushed out to 2029. Erick Erickson then turns to the horseshoe theory tying together the Nazi curious weirdos on the right and the effective altruism crowd at Anthropic who want you to worry about the wellbeing of AI chatbots, and why both groups are really just asking to be put in charge of your life. Plus Xi Jinping appearing to fall ill at the BRICS summit in India, the purge of his own generals, Mitch McConnell's decline, and Susie Wiles announcing she is cancer free.

Erick makes the case that the AI safety panic is regulatory capture dressed up as the apocalypse: Anthropic, racing toward an IPO and burning cash on GPUs and data centers, wants Washington to freeze its competitors in place before open source models from Meta catch up. He plays Kara Swisher's nuclear nonproliferation analogy on CNN and dismantles it with the history of the China Syndrome, Three Mile Island, and the 100 nuclear plants America never built, then plays David Sacks calling Dario Amodei's bluff. The back half is a full teardown of effective altruism, the Sam Bankman Fried utilitarian cult now running AI safety, complete with shrimp welfare and a Beth Barnes TED talk.

Erick returns to Beau French and the Indian American Longhorns fans in Stetsons to argue that a legitimate grievance about H-1B visa abuse is being allowed to rot into racism, and he warns that America is walking the same road that produced the AfD and Europe's far right. Then a hard look at the numbers: the New York Times and Siena College poll has Democrats up 51 to 43 on the generic ballot, President Trump at 38 percent approval, 31 percent on the war in Iran and 28 percent on cost of living, with Nate Cohn drawing the 2006 comparison. The bond market is doing its own voting, with the 10 year Treasury yield at a 19 year high, the Dow off more than 400 points, and crude at 106 dollars a barrel.

Erick opens on a religious liberty case the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear, and it is one he says he could not believe was real: University Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, threatened Daniel Grand with jail, sent police to monitor his house, and encouraged neighbors to report "unauthorized prayer activity" after he tried to gather ten Orthodox Jews for a minyan on the Sabbath, with neighbors telling him "we don't want your kind here" because they feared the neighborhood would be labeled Jewish. He walks it back through Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief fired over his Sunday school book, Jack Phillips and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and RLUIPA. The second half is the Supreme Court blocking the Trump administration's Postal Service ballot mail rule, with Erick taking the side of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett against Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, and asking Republicans a simple question: do you want Barack Obama's Postal Service holding a barcode that says this ballot belongs to this Republican?

Erick walks through regulatory capture in real time: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay, the coordinated Jacob Coxson resignation rollout in the Wall Street Journal, and the Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar bill to create a cabinet level AI agency. He traces the money from Dustin Moskovitz, Open Philanthropy, and the Survival and Flourishing Fund back to the same people who own Anthropic, then explains why Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's open source models are the real competitive threat and why nobody is asking for strict liability. In the second half he takes apart Texas Railroad Commission candidate Beau French for a racist tweet about Indian American students at the University of Texas, and argues the right is repeating the identity politics mistake that cost the left two elections.

Erick opens with a progressive tech writer's essay about neighbors named Bob and Van, men whose politics never came up because politics was not the whole of life, and turns it into an argument that social media has catechized both parties out of normalcy. He plays Bill Maher's Real Time monologue on radical Islamism, Osama bin Laden's polling among young Americans, and the parallel between 2020 stolen election claims and Gaza genocide claims as tribal loyalty tests, then walks the Senate Leadership Fund's $25 million ad buy across seven states and explains what the missing Georgia money says about Mike Collins, Jon Ossoff, and the AI generated attack ad nobody asked for. He closes on Ken Paxton's AI generated James Talarico ad, Abdul El-Sayed's refusal to answer for Hasan Piker in Michigan, and President Trump lifting tariffs on Irish whiskey as a favor.

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Erick Erickson takes a caller's tale of two Georgia ad campaigns, Rick Jackson's brutal and effective spots against Keisha Lance Bottoms versus the One Nation tax ads carrying Mike Collins against Jon Ossoff, and turns it into the central question of the 2026 midterms: a blue wave is coming, but is the red wall the GOP built taller than the wave? He stakes out his own call of a 10 to 15 seat Democratic House pickup with the Senate holding, walks through New Hampshire, Michigan, North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Iowa, and Kansas, and plays the Roger Marshall town hall where Republicans in the crowd, not just the progressive hecklers, start booing the moment he defends tariffs. In the back half he digs into the ProPublica report that a Russian oligarch quietly bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding, then explains in plain language why a $5,000 tariff dividend check would pour fuel on inflation right as the Federal Reserve decides whether to raise interest rates.

On the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, Erick Erickson opens not with the news but with Welles Crowther, the 24 year old equities trader on the 104th floor of the South Tower who tied a red bandana around his face, carried an injured woman down 17 floors, and went back up the stairs again and again until he died alongside firefighters in the lobby. Prompted by a question from his daughter Evelyn about whether Americans have turned misery into a way of honoring the day, Erick draws a hard line between grieving and honoring, reads the names of the 2,977 dead, and argues that the unity of September 12 was cheap unity because fear is free. He revisits Todd Beamer and Flight 93, the 343 firefighters and 71 police officers, Article 5 of NATO, Cantor Fitzgerald's 658 employees, President Trump's posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for Crowther, and the algorithmic outrage industry that now profits from keeping Americans sorted into factions.

Erick Erickson takes apart the Politico story out of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas claiming panic over the Senate map, siding with Chris LaCivita and walking through why a five point Democratic polling bias in September means Republicans in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Maine, Alaska, and Texas are actually ahead, not drowning. Then the August consumer price index lands at 3.4 percent, Mark Zandi and Thomas Ryan warn the Federal Reserve may raise rates next week, the 30 year mortgage hits 6.76 percent, and Erick issues a direct challenge to President Trump: take every tariff to zero between now and Election Day and run the experiment.

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Erick Erickson closes the 25th anniversary of September 11 by playing the sound a camera crew heard at the World Trade Center that afternoon, more than 300 firefighter PASS device alarms sounding under the rubble, then turns the overwhelming weight of the news into practical advice out of Jeremiah's letter to the exiles in Babylon: seek the welfare of the city in which you live, because Washington is not coming to help you. From there it is an Open Line Friday run through the Lindsay Clancy trial twist, where juror Paula Devlin told Gayle King on CBS that the lone holdout who wanted a guilty verdict was the only black man on the panel, plus Ted Cruz and Dave McCormick warning about a red green alliance of communists and Islamists at the Republican convention, President Trump's wardrobe jab at Ken Paxton, and the $5,000 Trump dividend that landed like a lead balloon with congressional Republicans. Erick ends where he began, with Welles Crowther, the red bandana, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Erick opens on President Trump's Dallas convention promise of a $5,000 "Trump dividend" to every adult citizen if Republicans hold the House and Senate, and calls it what it is: a bribe funded by the tariffs listeners are already paying, with JD Vance out on Fox News defending it. His counteroffer is zero income tax for married couples with kids earning under $200,000, money people keep instead of money the government prints and hands back. Then the real story of the hour, the Republican midterm message of common sense versus crazy, as James Talarico scrambles to walk back six genders and a non-binary God, Abdul El-Sayed runs from his 9/11 problem, John Fetterman cuts an ad for Dave McCormick, and a new Tony Fabrizio poll shows Talarico beating Ken Paxton in Texas by four.

Erick opens with the hard economic numbers Republicans keep trying to spin past: the Atlanta Fed says a household now needs $124,674 a year to afford a median priced home against a median income just over $80,000, wholesale prices rose 0.4 percent in August with the producer price index running 5.4 percent annually, diesel surged 24.1 percent, and West Texas crude sits above $101 a barrel with Brent at $106. His argument is that President Trump should stop spinning and level with people, because Iran is deliberately wrecking the American economy to elect weak Democrats and win a nuclear weapon. Then the story of the hour: Erick walks through the case that Jacob Coxon's dramatic resignation from Anthropic after six weeks is not organic at all, but a funded operation to regulate American AI into oblivion.

Erick opens the final hour on Eva Moskowitz's Washington Post op-ed and the Success Academy lawsuit against New York education commissioner Betty Rosa, filed after the state blocked US News and World Report from reporting aggregate AP exam results, dropping one Success Academy high school from 11th in New York to 196th overnight. Then the news of the hour: the United Kingdom has formally requested the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate on 59 charges, including 15 counts of rape, and Erick names the right wing influencers who elevated them anyway. He closes on the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11 with George W. Bush at Ground Zero, the 537 votes in Florida, the USA Today recount that would have cost Bush the presidency under his own hanging chad standard, and a hard argument about Islam, Charlie Hebdo, and the post liberal right.

Erick opens the midterm stretch run by dismantling the Republican panic over Senate polling, using Patrick Ruffini's study of 3,312 polls showing Democrats are overstated by an average of 3.7 points, with the high water mark landing right at Labor Day. Then, as the Republican convention opens on the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he argues the GOP should embrace the nationalized election and run on it, pointing to the Great Lakes PAC ad hitting Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race. Plus Trump's Presidential Medal of Freedom for the Man in the Red Bandana, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declaring "I am the house now."

Erick opens hour two with survivors calling in on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, including Robert, who was on the 101st floor of the South Tower, and Greg, who listened over a squawk box as Cantor Fitzgerald went silent. Then he tears into the Trump administration's trade war of choice with Canada and the move to ban Bombardier jets, warning it puts Roger Marshall in Kansas, Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Rogers in Michigan at real risk two months before the election. He closes with a nuanced defense of Flock cameras paired with a hard line on facial recognition, and a blistering take on Anthropic researchers publicly claiming AI could kill humanity.

Erick opens hour three with the Wall Street Journal story on why returning online orders got hard, Lane Bryant restocking fees, shortened Macy's and Home Depot return windows, McDonald's killing free refills, and argues none of it is corporate penny pinching. It is what a low trust society looks like when a post Christian America abandons the ethics that made cheap trust possible. He then takes a caller on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and delivers his sharpest attack yet on the JD Vance welfare proposal, calling it a plan to turn stay at home moms into welfare queens, before objecting to the Attorney General speaking at the Republican convention in Dallas.

The post Labor Day panic has arrived, and Erick Erickson says the bad news is actually good news. He walks through the Real Clear Politics generic ballot average, Donald Trump's 36 to 39 percent approval, the two point Democratic polling bias, and the Senate map from Ken Paxton in Texas to Susan Collins in Maine, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Mike Collins in Georgia. His verdict: Republicans probably lose seats, but there is no blue tsunami coming, and the billion dollars Trump is finally spending changes the math.

Erick Erickson takes apart the Trump administration's draft rule, championed by JD Vance, that would let married couples with a stay at home spouse collect roughly $9,000 per child from a Health and Human Services child care fund built in the 1990s to move single working mothers off welfare. His verdict: it is the Diet Coke of socialism, and you cannot beat the real thing. He walks the $75,000 income cliff, the promotions dad will never take, the marketable skills mom will never rebuild, and offers his own alternative: a $15,000 per child tax deduction with no cap, plus deducting local school property taxes for homeschool and private school families.

Erick Erickson walks through the Wall Street Journal report that Iran's oil dollars are drying up, with no Iranian crude crossing the US Navy blockade since mid July and offshore stockpiles feeding China down from 90 million barrels to 29 million. His tell that the regime itself is cracking: the Ayatollah has had two London houses foreclosed on for missed mortgage payments, and the Iranian army is going unpaid and hungry. He also unpacks the new OECD PISA study showing a worldwide learning recession, and keeps taking apart the JD Vance stay at home parent child care subsidy.

Erick Erickson defends the Lindsay Clancy jury against the online mob, walking through the one quirk of Massachusetts law that almost nobody on social media understands: Massachusetts is the only state where the prosecution must prove a defendant was sane beyond a reasonable doubt. Then the August jobs report lands at 162,000 new jobs, roughly three times what economists expected, and Erick explains why the good news may force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates instead of cutting them. Plus the Politico scoop on Republicans who do not want Donald Trump campaigning in their districts, and the CNN KFile dig on democratic socialist candidate Will Lawrence.

Erick Erickson opens football season with Ben Sasse's Wall Street Journal case for high school football as one of the last institutions still forming young men, then makes his own argument for keeping politics out of sports, out of movies, and out of your hamburger. He plays the viral supercut of the words Candace Owens cannot pronounce, takes a caller on Reza Pahlavi and whether the exiled Shah's son can actually lead a post-theocratic Iran, and reads new intelligence reporting that a more confident Iran is preparing to escalate around the Strait of Hormuz. Plus the Rick Jackson ad out of Georgia that Erick says shows Republicans exactly how to win this year.

Erick Erickson tells the online right the hard truth about the SAVE Act: most Americans have no idea what it is, and no election bill is what stands between Republicans and November. He argues gas prices, wages trailing inflation and grocery bills are the real problem, then plays James Talarico on white privilege and blinders, Abdul El-Sayed telling Stephen A. Smith he wants a secure border while he abolishes ICE, and Michigan's Will Lawrence on ending heterosexual households. Plus the Missouri Supreme Court blowing up the state's congressional map 60 days out, Paul Ryan and Andrew Ross Sorkin on the debt, Social Security and the retirement age, and Mark Thiessen's plan to let Ukraine build its own Patriot interceptors.

Erick opens with a hot dog stand anecdote from New Way Weiners in Macon that matches the polling data: a Trump voter who is not angry, just disappointed, with diesel over six dollars a gallon. He walks through Karl Rove's Wall Street Journal warning that a Trump rally a day in October and an ad blitz built on the president himself will sink Republicans at 39.6 percent approval, then takes apart Joe Rogan's claim that ending poverty would end crime. Also: Sam Altman and Howard Lutnick at the G20 Asheville summit, the vitamin K shot panic, and the death of Gloria Steinem.

Erick tracks the Iran war as Brent hits 95 dollars and West Texas crude hits 91, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claiming the Strait of Hormuz is flowing and the regime is finished, while Iranian missiles hit Kuwait and possibly a hotel in Jordan. He then reports the growing revolt inside the Pentagon against Pete Hegseth after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll's resignation, and lays out his full theory of why the Republican Party keeps nominating the runner up, which points to Ted Cruz in 2028 if JD Vance stumbles. Breaking at the end of the hour: Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox Business after 12 years.

Erick knocks down the viral photos of the rusted USS Abraham Lincoln as left wing propaganda, pointing to the HMS Hermes coming back from the Falklands in 1982 in worse shape, then takes a call from Tom, a Navy pilot's father who says the fleet is simply broken and that 62 percent of jet pilots and 58 percent of helicopter pilots will not re-up under Pete Hegseth. The hour turns to Tom Homan on Fox laying out three straight record breaking months of ICE arrests and the national security case against birth tourism from Russia and China, Marco Rubio sanctioning Raul Castro's grandson and Banco Exterior de Cuba, and Erick's question about why the ICE protests vanished exactly when Cuban money in American shell accounts got frozen.

Erick returns from break with good scan news for his wife, then breaks down why Army Secretary Dan Driscoll walked into the White House, told President Trump how many generals and admirals Pete Hegseth had quietly purged, and resigned on the spot. He also takes on Laura Ingraham by name over her "never Trump" attack, walks through Harry Enten's numbers showing Republicans running ahead of Trump's own 37 percent approval, and explains why the first Secure America PAC ads are aimed at exactly the wrong voters.

Erick Erickson opens by answering Laura Ingraham's Twitter attack over his Ken Paxton column, then defends Amy Coney Barrett for siding with Clarence Thomas and Donald Trump in the 5 to 4 White House ballroom ruling while tearing apart John Roberts and his "aesthetic injury" dissent. The hour closes on the deadlocked Lindsay Clancy jury in Massachusetts, with Erick and attorney Chad from Montgomery arguing the prosecution overcharged the case and that jurors, not social media, should decide it.

Erick Erickson breaks with much of the right on Flock cameras, taking apart Ron DeSantis and his move to pull every license plate reader off Florida's state highways, and laying out three fixes he says beat an outright ban: prohibit facial recognition in public rights of way, mandatory prison sentences for police who abuse the system, and a private right to sue Flock Safety when it shares data a city told it to keep local. Caller Troy asks what "papers" actually means in the Fourth Amendment, and Erick walks through persons, houses, papers and effects, the Supreme Court holding that a license plate carries no expectation of privacy, and how the FBI already used cell phone tower data to build the January 6 cases without a single camera. The hour then turns to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shutting down 110 driving schools over English proficiency violations, illegal aliens holding commercial driver's licenses in California and New York, Ken Paxton, Lake America, and a personal update on ten years of a drug keeping Erick's wife alive with stage four lung cancer.

Erick Erickson walks the whole 2026 Senate map, refusing to back off his warning that Ken Paxton is a bad general election candidate against James Talarico in Texas, then breaks live news that Donald Trump has launched new strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz after Iran tried to mine the strait and fired eight missiles at an American base in Jordan. He takes apart Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan campaign, the Hasan Piker problem, the Charlamagne tha God appearance and the fireworks and asthma clip, and closes the hour explaining why he has changed his mind on whether Islam as it is being imported by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR is compatible with the Western world.

Erick Erickson opens by explaining why the Iran war cannot be negotiated like a normal conflict: the Islamic Republic's Mahdiism means the Ayatollahs believe they must bring about the apocalypse. He then walks through Brett McGurk's argument that Iran is actually losing its leverage in the Strait of Hormuz, with oil flows back to two thirds of pre war levels and Iran's economy contracting more than 5 percent. The hour turns on the Washington Post leak of the Secretary of Defense orders book, in which Pete Hegseth was told by the Navy, European Command, Pacific Command and Southern Command that a prolonged Iran deployment cannot be sustained, and on why Erick believes the leak is a 2028 hit job aimed at Hegseth from inside JD Vance's orbit.

Erick Erickson reads President Trump's Truth Social post warning that communities rejecting data centers will end up "backwards and poor," then explains why that is the wrong message and why JD Vance's more nuanced version is the right one. He walks through the history of populist movements from Huey Long to Zell Miller to argue that MAGA likely does not survive Trump intact, and he points out the irony that TikTok, which Trump still refuses to shut down, is the original vector for nearly every viral anti data center complaint about water usage, land use, and noise. In the second half he breaks down Trump's Venezuela oil deal in full, giving the President real credit for removing Nicolas Maduro and reopening the fields to Chevron and Halliburton while calling the Pentagon equity structure exactly what it is: socialism.

Erick discusses the progressive dystopia that is America as the Handmaid's Tale even as progressives like Kathy Hochul are willing to cover their heads to go talk to muslim men who'd deny them rights. He also points out how the same standard the media is focused on between Hasan Piker and Abdul El-Sayed is playing out between Tucker Carson and J.D. Vance. Erick also discussed Milo Yiannopoulos's deportation and how independent voters say they support the President's deportation of all illegal aliens, but, when rubber meets the road, they do not.

Erick Erickson opens Open Line Friday on President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America" and asks the obvious question: who exactly is switching their midterm vote over a lake? He then reports the real story behind the Canada trade war, that Jamieson Greer negotiated a deal both sides liked before Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sabotaged it over French language packaging, and warns it could cost Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Rogers in Michigan. Plus Trump's Arthur Schlesinger presidential rankings blunder, the data center backlash to the backlash, and 200,000 Chinese accounts shut down on Twitter.

Erick Erickson uses the Callaway Golf and Good Good Golf blowup, a bad driver ad, a public apology, and a canceled partnership, to make a much bigger point about a country with no adults in the room, and he tells his own story of the tweet that nearly cost him CNN and how Rush Limbaugh became the mentor nobody else gave him. Then caller Randy asks why data centers do not go into empty strip malls and factories, and Erick gives the zoning and contamination answer from his Macon City Council days, plus the Effingham County build that is actually pushing Georgia Power rates down. He closes with hard advice for Flock Safety on license plate readers, facial recognition, and the abuse stories piling up.

Erick Erickson closes Open Line Friday with major Iran news, reporting from Axios and Barak Ravid that the United States has broken Iran's grip on the Strait of Hormuz, plus the full CENTCOM update from Admiral Brad Cooper on the minesweeping operation, the naval blockade, and the 750 million barrels of crude the Navy has escorted through. He breaks news live that Chevron and Halliburton are investing billions in Venezuela's oil fields and directing that flow to the United States, a huge win he credits to President Trump, then covers Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh at Jackson Hole warning that rates could go up in September. The hour ends with a long, moving tribute to Dolly Parton, the only American with 80 percent approval from both Republicans and Democrats, and a hard word for the Christians online claiming she is in hell.

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CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise trip to Moscow to warn Vladimir Putin off any attack on NATO, and hours later Latvia declared a border emergency and sent troops to its frontier with Russia and Belarus. Erick Erickson walks through the Wall Street Journal exclusive, the near extinction of America's Patriot missile batteries, and why the Pentagon never told Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to ramp up production. Then a blistering segment on Mike Collins, the Georgia Senate race, and a Republican campaign staffed by white nationalists and Holocaust deniers while John Ossoff cruises.

Erick Erickson maps the midterm Senate landscape after President Trump tells voters to "pretend I'm on the ballot," with Karoline Leavitt's last day as press secretary, a $400,000 a head Houston fundraiser for Ken Paxton, Abdul El-Sayed scrambling to distance himself from Hassan Piker in Michigan, and a democratic socialist surging against Chris Pappas in the New Hampshire primary while the GOP sleeps through it. Then a raw, emotional hour on the Lindsay Clancy trial, where Erick refuses both the men who deny postpartum depression is real and the women online insisting a mother could never strangle her three children. Callers Carol, Dwayne, Liz, and Krista weigh in on Andrea Yates, Susan Smith, and where mitigation ends and responsibility begins.

Erick Erickson closes the show with the most personal monologue of the day, previewing his Atlanta Journal Constitution column on Johnathan Hamby, the psychotic man who stabbed a stranger to death on the Atlanta Beltline, and arguing that deinstitutionalization was cruelty dressed up as compassion. He walks listeners from his hometown of Jackson, Louisiana, where the state mental hospital's steam whistle set the town clock, to Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, once the largest mental institution in the world with 12,000 patients, and asks what is actually more humane: a bed, three meals, and enforced treatment, or a bridge in Atlanta. Callers Linda, Susan, Sharon, Pat, Lynn, Tony, and Kathleen close out the Lindsay Clancy conversation with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, the timed errand entered into evidence, and the over medication of patients by non medical prescribers.

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Erick Erickson opens with the Coldstream Guards playing "9 to 5" at Buckingham Palace and turns the death of Dolly Parton into a sermon on the second great commandment: she died with $650 million after giving away $600 million, refused the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and told Tennessee to feed the poor instead of building her a statue. Then Erick breaks down Meta's $18 billion settlement with 48 state attorneys general, calling it a shakedown that makes Mark Zuckerberg your child's mommy and daddy. Also, the death of Tim Curry, and a night at the Braves and Dodgers game at Truist Park.

Erick Erickson reads the extraordinary public apology from the family of Jonathan Hamby, the mentally ill man with more than thirty arrests who stabbed a stranger to death on the Atlanta Beltline, and turns it into a hard argument that closing the mental institutions was never compassion. Then billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller goes to the Wall Street Journal to tell his own protege, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that doubling long dated bond buybacks is price management, not liquidity management, with the national debt crossing $40 trillion and net interest passing $1.1 trillion. Plus the SEC follows the Big Ten on NFL players returning to college, and Apple sets September 9, which sends Erick into Rush Limbaugh memories.

Charles Barkley goes on Michael Smerconish and says he supports his gay and transgender friends but that men have no business competing against women, and Erick Erickson explains why an 80/20 issue still gets covered as though the girls defending girls sports are the villains, with Sophie Cunningham, Enes Kanter Freedom, Adam Silver, and Cathy Engelbert all in the mix. Then Darline Graham beats Ralph Norman by roughly thirteen to one in spending to win the South Carolina Senate nomination, and Heather Long of Navy Federal Credit Union flags a 3 percent personal savings rate even as Bloomberg reports hobby spending at a record share of American consumption. Plus a caller on free enterprise versus capitalism, Calvin Coolidge, the Meta settlement, tariff carve outs, and the cinnamon roll recipe finally getting filmed.

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Erick Erickson takes apart Abdul El-Sayed's disastrous Jesse Watters interview on Fox News, the Hassan Piker problem now swallowing his Michigan Senate campaign, and why the overwhelmingly white Democratic Socialists of America keep recruiting non-white candidates who cannot stop talking. Then the breaking story of the day: CIA Director John Ratcliffe lands unannounced in Moscow after flying in from Riga, and Erick explains why the most pro-Ukraine official in the Trump administration was the one sent to tell Vladimir Putin that NATO is not going anywhere. Plus Target's Halloween costume apology and the Big Ten shutting the door on NFL washouts.

Erick Erickson confesses he has been an original, card-carrying Canada hater since a French teacher at his school in Dubai told the class that real Americans should call themselves "United Statesians," then turns hard on President Trump for launching a trade war with America's largest trading partner 70 days before the midterms, explaining that the entire trade deficit with Canada is heavy crude oil and lumber and that Howard Lutnick reportedly blew up a finished deal from trade representative Jamieson Greer. Then Erick, an elections lawyer by trade, cuts through the panic over the Supreme Court and Trump's mail-in ballot executive order, showing that all the Court allowed was Homeland Security and the Postal Service to build citizenship lists while the lower court injunction blocking enforcement stays fully in place. The hour ends with breaking news from Variety that Dolly Parton has died at 80.

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Erick Erickson plays the Parton family's official video announcement from Brian Seaver, Dolly's longtime head of security and the son of Cassie Parton, and then spends the hour on the life of Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, dead at 80, reunited with her husband Carl Dean, the woman who wrote "I Will Always Love You," "Jolene," and "Coat of Many Colors," sold more than 100 million records, played nine instruments, and quietly gave away books and money for decades. Erick calls her the last American icon everyone loved regardless of politics, and warns that the demons Jesus cast into the pigs eventually invented social media, so the haters are coming. Then a rare guest: National Federation of Independent Business president Brad Close joins Erick to explain why Obamacare made it nearly impossible for small employers to insure their people, and a caller from Jacksonville gets an elections-lawyer answer on mail-in ballots and non-citizen voting.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent takes to the Financial Times to declare an "economic D-Day" against Iran, promising secondary sanctions on every nation, bank, and shadow fleet propping up Tehran, with China the name he pointedly never writes. Erick Erickson explains why none of it is possible without the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and why Vice President JD Vance's push to abandon that status would hand the world to China, Russia, and Iran. Then the story swallowing the news cycle instead: Donald Trump's 50% tariff threat against Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney refusing to wait and firing back the day after Labor Day, Jamieson Greer's version of the collapse, and Argentine beef versus furious American ranchers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent goes live to open the sanctions campaign against Iran, with OFAC hitting more than 60 entities, individuals, and vessels, new sectoral determinations on digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping, a promise that every branch of Bank Melli goes dark, and a hint that a major financial institution gets sanctioned by the end of the week. Erick Erickson translates it (the UAE and Dubai have already cut Iran off, and China will tell us to pound sand), then laughs at the San Diego City Council opening its meeting with a Kumeyaay Nation land acknowledgment and takes a caller from Dayton, Ohio on Canada, Ohio HR 194, and a Charter of Rights whose freedoms are subject to "reasonable limits." The hour's centerpiece is a full accounting of why Americans no longer trust the people asking them to accept Flock cameras and data centers, told through sand dumped in skate parks, an arrested paddle boarder, and five years of experts who lied.

Erick Erickson opens on the Georgia governor's race, where Keisha Lance Bottoms, running against his friend Rick Jackson, told a C-SPAN audience she was proud to end Atlanta's multimillion dollar agreement with ICE because "all money ain't good money," and Erick answers with Laken Riley and with a 29 year old named Ramon Harris stabbed to death on the Atlanta Beltline by Jonathan Hamby, a man arrested more than thirty times since 2011 and turned loose every time. That becomes the hour's argument: three strikes laws, reopened mental institutions, and a hard rewriting of what loving your neighbor actually requires. Then the Iran block, with Scott Bessent's economic D-Day, the Strait of Hormuz dark fleet data, and the Straits of Malacca chokepoint the United States and Indonesia are now closing on China.

Erick Erickson opens Open Line Friday with Isaac Newton's laws of motion and argues that American politics now runs on the third one: every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and nothing is left to slow either side down. He reads The Economist's warning that superintelligent AI with legal rights could turn humans into "labradors for the machines," calls it nonsense from Silicon Valley weirdos who do not believe in God and think they can build one, and tells the story of ChatGPT refusing to help him cut a lock off his own office door while Claude just told him where to saw. Then the backlash roll call: the Toronto Tempo's non-binary she/they snapping turtle mascot, Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins resigning after 11 years over spiked columns featuring female athletes, the European hunt for everyone who exposed Jason Arday, Flock cameras being chopped down, and the data center revolt. The hour closes with the fiscal argument of the day: with a guaranteed five to six percent return in the government bucket, nobody has a reason to put a dollar in the private sector bucket, which is exactly why Scott Bessent is wrong that we can grow our way out of the debt.

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Erick Erickson turns the second law of thermodynamics into an economics lesson and lands it on Seattle: Starbucks is cutting 224 corporate jobs, including 120 employees who refused to move to Nashville, and between Brian Niccol's restructuring and Amazon's exodus, Washington State's progressives have taxed and regulated their own economy cold while Nashville takes 1,500 to 2,000 new residents a week. Then he refuses to let the tariff argument go, noting that President Trump just suspended the 25 percent tariff on imported beef and guaranteed the beef will now sell 25 percent below market, which is exactly the number his own listeners insisted had nothing to do with prices. The hour ends with Oreo Gate, the viral elementary school mom group chat that another mother ran through AI and turned into gospel music, and Erick is fully emotionally invested.

Erick Erickson closes Open Line Friday with the cleanest explanation yet of why Americans hate data centers: it is not the water, the power bills, or the fake claim that vibrations cause miscarriages, it is that the arguments against fracking failed while the arguments against data centers are landing, and the only difference is the messengers. The oil men who fracked lived in the community, went to the local church, sent kids to the local schools, and fixed what their neighbors complained about. The AI CEOs are coastal creeps who tell you on camera that the machines will take your job and you will love it, with Dario Amodei's wife and Jeffrey Epstein and The Economist's "labradors for the machines" piece as exhibits. He also takes callers on seniors getting crushed on fixed incomes, Social Security reform and the George W. Bush plan Republicans were too scared to pass, and the Justice Department's new rule restoring gun rights to rehabilitated nonviolent felons.

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The national debt just crossed $40 trillion, and it took only 95 days to add the last trillion, so Erick Erickson opens with the math nobody in Washington wants: our debt now exceeds our GDP, Social Security and Medicare are the engine, and neither party will touch it. He plays Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on CNBC defending the bond buybacks, promising fiscal consolidation with Russ Vought, and laying out what he calls the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world against Iran, with the strait under American control and Iranian oil exports at zero for 72 hours straight. Then a blunt message to President Trump: get off the White House lawn, stop showing off the new helicopter pad and the gold leaf, kill every tariff today, and go make the case against Abdul El-Sayed and the Democratic Socialists before the midterms.

Erick Erickson plays the moment CNN's Boris Sanchez confronts Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Ashik Siddiqui over the DSA celebrating Fidel Castro, telling him on live television that his own grandfather fought in the Cuban revolution and was then locked up by Castro for 20 years for speaking his mind. He stacks it with Abdul El-Sayed answering black voters by saying he is African too, Hasan Piker promising to be Angie Nixon's loyal soldier while she insists she has no idea who he is, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quietly writing off Florida to move money into Texas, where Republicans are panicking that Ken Paxton is a lazy, corrupt candidate who could hand the seat to James Talarico. Then the heart of the hour: a Ben Domenech speech on the earned collapse of trust in American elites, and Erick's argument that the Flock camera fight, the data center backlash, and local governments signing secret non disclosure agreements are all the same trust problem.

Breaking news lands mid hour: Jessica Bowie, 35, arrested and charged with attempting to provide material support to ISIS after plotting to blow up the New York State Capitol in Albany, and Erick Erickson walks through the federal complaint, the FBI confidential source posing as an ISIS facilitator, and why progressives who instantly guessed MAGA guessed wrong. The heart of the hour is Erick's argument that everyone quoting George Orwell has the wrong book: we are not living in 1984, we are living in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, sedated by soma and screens and manufactured anxiety, which is why he changed his mind on Flock cameras once he noticed the Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America are their loudest opponents. Then Iran, with David Rohde on MS Now conceding Trump's economic pressure campaign could actually work, Trey Yingst on the UAE cutting off all trade with Iran, and satellite evidence that the Iranians are dumping oil into the desert because their tanks are full.

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The AI data center revolt is now a live midterm threat, and Erick Erickson argues the real problem is not the data centers, it is that Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and the rest of the AI CEOs are their own worst salesmen, the charming movie villains you were warned about, while Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are the only ones who figured out how to sell a community on jobs, tax relief, and skills training. He reads the Axios scoop on the NRSC's private memo warning that Senator Jon Husted is losing Ohio to Sherrod Brown over data centers, walks through Vivek Ramaswamy's property tax plan and Jason Kelce's Garage Beer ad, then turns to Ukraine, where drone crews are burning Wildberries distribution centers outside Moscow to make the Russian public finally feel the war while JD Vance begs Kyiv to pull its punches. He closes on the fuel crisis behind it all: a record diesel crack spread, 40 percent of Russian refining offline, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright on why American fracking is the only thing keeping this from being a catastrophe.

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Moderna and Merck just posted the first successful late stage trial of a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, intismeran paired with Keytruda, cutting the return and spread of high risk melanoma, and Erick Erickson spends the hour singing the praises of Big Pharma and taking apart the conspiracy that drug companies are hiding the cure for cancer. He talks about his wife's stage 4 lung cancer, why a lung transplant was never an option for her, and why the people most certain a cure is being suppressed are the loneliest and most isolated people in America. Then a full turn to the loneliness data: Brad Wilcox on unmarried young men outnumbering married men two to one, Rosaria Butterfield on why your messy house is an excuse and not a reason, and why going to church is the cheapest mental health treatment in the country even if you do not believe.

Florida's primary blew up both parties overnight: Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon beat impeachment hero Alexander Vindman for the Senate nomination while spending 13 times less, and Republicans took out the trash, dumping Cory Mills in Florida 7 and burying anti-Israel candidates James Fishback and Dan Bilzerian in single digits. Erick Erickson breaks down what the DSA surge means for Texas, Ohio and Alaska money, plays Darlene Graham telling a South Carolina debate audience she is "not that informed on national security," and exposes the trust fund hypocrisy of Democratic Socialist leaders in New York and the terror ties trailing Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

Florida goes to the polls and Erick Erickson makes the case that Republicans should fire Cory Mills in Florida's 7th, where former Orlando news anchor Ryan Elijah is polling ahead of a congressman under investigation for steering contracts plus revenge porn and abuse allegations. He coins "Podcastistan" for the circle of podcasters (Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Thomas Massie, James Fishback) who interview each other about hating the Jews, and asks whether Dan Bilzerian's anti Israel campaign against Randy Fine gets any traction. Then the story almost nobody is covering: the diesel crack has hit a record $102 as Iran hammers refineries and the Strait of Hormuz, Russia is shipping TNT and drone parts across the Caspian, and NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and Al Jazeera all report Iran now believes war is inevitable and is weighing a first strike.

Jon Ossoff dragged Natalie Harp, a bone cancer survivor who lives because Donald Trump signed the Right to Try Act, into a campaign speech to imply an affair with the president, and Erick Erickson takes apart the smear and the hyper online staff behind it. He also answers Matt Walsh's claim that postpartum depression is not real, celebrates the Mississippi Miracle that has Mississippi fourth graders number one in the nation in reading and math, and defends Flock license plate cameras while calling for hard prison time for cops who abuse them.

Erick Erickson closes out the Flock camera fight with three callers, including a Metro Atlanta police officer, a listener whose cousin was killed by a hit and run driver the cameras identified, and a caller who wants a warrant requirement, and lands on a middle ground: keep the cameras, and give police who abuse the data mandatory prison time, like the Haines City, Florida officer charged with tracking his estranged wife's car 717 times in 21 months. Then Abdul El-Sayed and Florida DSA candidate Oliver Larkin make the Democratic Socialist case for abolishing private insurance, and Erick answers with the story of a healthy sole proprietor whose post Obamacare plan only works if he goes to the emergency room. The heart of the hour is debt and deficit: the 30 year treasury hit 5.323 percent, a 19 year high, the diesel crack is over $100 for the first time ever, and American families are now taking out buy now pay later loans to cover rent, power bills, and tax bills.

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Erick Erickson explains what the media is getting wrong about President Trump cutting back joint military exercises with South Korea: the real driver is a Seoul government drifting toward China, not an attempt to woo Kim Jong-un, and Trump keeps undermining a defensible decision with his own social media. He walks through Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal column on Trump's collapsing approval numbers and lame duck status, the JD Vance camp's "America in decline" argument against Marco Rubio's case for American strength, and why Ronald Reagan beat Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter's politics of managed decline. Then the story he refused to chase until now: Admiral Brad Cooper's Wall Street Journal piece on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the fake videos seeded by Iranian propaganda, and the planned rotation of the USS George Washington that the press recast as a crisis.

Erick Erickson makes his sharpest case yet against Vice President JD Vance, arguing that Vance is to economics what Candace Owens is to the Charlie Kirk assassination: a professional contrarian who lands on the fringe answer and calls it heterodoxy. Erick plays three separate Vance clips (a think tank, the Senate floor, and Fox News) in which the vice president calls America's reserve currency status a "resource curse" that lets American consumers buy things too cheaply, then walks through the Heritage Foundation research on what the dollar actually buys you: cheaper mortgages, cheaper car loans, cheaper groceries, lower inflation and lower interest rates than anywhere else on earth. He notes that China, Russia, the Democratic Socialists of America, Tucker Carlson, and Vladimir Putin's favorite philosopher Alexander Dugin all want the dollar dethroned, and plays President Trump saying flatly that losing it means third world status. Then a Wall Street Journal scoop that should terrify Republicans: Iran is preparing to widen the war on purpose to spike gas prices and cost the GOP the midterms.

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Erick Erickson devotes the first half of the hour to a story he says you should know even if you do not want to: Jason Arday, the Cambridge University sociology professor and serial fabulist who took his own life after the Guardian, the Times Higher Education, and the Daily Telegraph unraveled a biography that was almost entirely invented. Erick walks the whole record, the plagiarized Liverpool John Moores thesis, the harassment complaints filed against the academics who caught him, the masked knifeman and the pig's head that closed circuit television and the Metropolitan Police could never find, the visiting professorships that Glasgow and Ohio State say never happened, and argues the real culprits are the white progressive elites who elevated an unqualified man to prove their own allyship, then blamed his critics when it collapsed. He runs the same pattern through Elizabeth Warren at Harvard, Ibram Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Duke lacrosse case, and the Rolling Stone hoax at the University of Virginia. The back half turns to a Democratic Party in a panic, with Hakeem Jeffries, Ro Khanna, and Rahm Emanuel all scrambling to put distance between themselves and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises unprecedented economic measures and a blockade of Iranian ports as $4 gas and $80 oil collide with the midterms, and Erick Erickson says the hard part out loud: we are losing a war against a country we could beat because there was never a plan. Then the case Republicans do not want to hear, that Ken Paxton is lazy, corrupt, and putting Texas in play for James Talarico, with Mark Halperin agreeing on tape. Plus Max Miller in Ohio, Cory Mills and Ron DeSantis in Florida, Mike Collins in Georgia, and Abdul El-Sayed's Detroit animal shelter record in Michigan.

Erick Erickson wades into the fight between Ben Shapiro and the Federalist's John Daniel Davidson over whether the American dream still works, and answers with a date: ten years ago his wife would be dead, because the lung cancer treatment that saved her did not exist yet. Using C.S. Lewis and the fifteenth Screwtape letter, he takes apart the professional pessimism spreading across the online right and makes the case for contentment. Then CNN's Harry Enten says he is running scared for Republicans as Democratic primary turnout blows past 25 million, and Erick argues over whether culture or the economy decides November, from Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan to Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Ken Paxton in Texas.

Stacey Abrams sits down with Kamala Harris and declares that the South has lived under soft authoritarianism since 1776 and that America has backdoored its way to a new Jim Crow, and Erick Erickson, who served on the city council in Macon, Georgia, answers with the Jim Crow signage still hanging in his city's terminal station and the people who actually want it kept up. From there he reads his "trust fund commies" piece in full, the argument that from Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx to Fidel Castro, Xi Jinping, Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner, socialism has always been the insurance policy of the well born against the creative destruction of a free market. Plus a caller on conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and why Luigi Mangione's zealous defense and life sentence prove the system worked.

Erick opens on the Wall Street Journal's tariff refund story (over 40 S&P 500 companies reporting some $9.6 billion, with Apple near $2.2 billion, Nike at $986 million, FedEx at $800 million, Amazon at $640 million, and GM at $500 million after the Supreme Court struck the tariffs) and skewers the populists who swore tariffs would not raise prices yet now demand a cut of the refunds. He then turns to the Tyler Robinson trial in the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson conspiracy theories, and the debunked Anthony Fauci mRNA miscarriage claim, arguing that information overload is pulling Americans away from reality itself and undermining the truth claims, most of all the resurrection, that society needs to survive.

Erick argues that precedent matters, tracing how Democrats spent decades using lawsuits and court settlements (California's Proposition 8, the state's refusal to defend it, Bill Clinton's illegal immigration consent decree, and Anthony Kennedy's Obergefell ruling) to bind future governments, and how the Trump Justice Department has now learned the same trick by declining to appeal Judge James Wesley Hendricks' Northern District of Texas ruling that struck down the National Firearms Act permit and $200 tax on suppressors and short barreled rifles. From Palmetto State Armory buyers skipping the paperwork to the Fifth Circuit tossing Biden's gas stove limits, Erick says "we learned it by watching you." He then celebrates the V8's comeback (the Wall Street Journal on Ram scrapping the Hurricane six for the Hemi, Stellantis, and GM), skewers the Cybertruck and Ford Lightning, and warns Republicans that Ken Paxton could actually lose to Democrat James Talarico, citing Mark Halperin's blunt on air alarm.

Erick digs into a troubling defense story: in the Combined Resolve war games in Germany, Ukrainian drone operators wiped out a US armored brigade every single time, exposing how far behind America has fallen even as Reaper drones run low and Iran picks off the rest. He ties it to a missile production problem (the Pentagon never sent Lockheed Martin and Raytheon the demand signal, dating back to the 1993 "last supper" consolidation dinner) and to a Trump class battleship the Navy openly says it does not need, calling it a jobs program instead of a warfighting force. Then he pivots to Luigi Mangione's expected federal guilty plea in the Brian Thompson murder, Abdul El-Sayed and Sharia's view of dogs behind Detroit's 74 percent shelter kill rate, and a full throated case for tort reform built around the dismissed Hershey Reese's peanut butter pumpkin lawsuit.

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Erick breaks down a wild primary night: Democratic socialist Francesca Hong loses Wisconsin after Governor Tony Evers talked David Crowley back into the race, the polls badly oversampled white progressives, and Mike Lindell gets crushed in Minnesota's GOP governor primary. Then he warns Republicans that college-educated suburban voters are the new turnout machine, that Ken Paxton is dragging down Texas against James Talarico, and delivers a signature monologue arguing progressivism is a religion, complete with a viral clip of a reporter insisting you "can't be racist against white people."

On the seventh anniversary of his syndicated show, Erick Erickson tells the untold story of how Rush Limbaugh "lied through his teeth" to launch his radio career and later fought behind the scenes to let him talk faith on the air. He then turns to the "progressive madrasas": how Stanford University let Marxists write the capitalism entry in its Encyclopedia of Philosophy and butchered Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. Along the way he unpacks critical theory, intersectionality, the "you can't be racist against white people" clip, and the "Yankee invasion of the SEC."

Erick walks through a sobering Washington Post editorial on America's fiscal reckoning: with Social Security projected insolvent by 2032 and the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund by 2033, demographics and mandatory spending are driving the country toward a debt cliff that no war or recession created. He revisits Mitch McConnell's "we will not fix it until we hit the cliff" prediction, George W. Bush's rejected 2005 Social Security privatization, cooling July inflation, and even floats Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sparking a baby boom, before turning to John Larson's Connecticut primary loss, the Anthony Fauci diaries, and the AI resume filters auto-rejecting qualified applicants.

Erick opens on the Washington Post's exclusive that President Donald Trump secretly slipped out of Turkey after the NATO summit in Ankara, boarding the old Air Force One as a decoy and then being shuttled by catering truck onto a smaller Air Force jet, all because of a credible Iranian assassination threat. The White House press corps is melting down that it was left "expendable" on the decoy plane, and Erick unloads on that self-obsession while asking the bigger question: why has Trump still not taken out the Iranian regime that keeps trying to kill him. He then turns to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend and his suspicious stock trades, Tucker Carlson interviewing Hunter Biden, and whether Trump even wants to win in November given his backing of scandal-plagued candidates Max Miller and Corey Mills.

Erick tears into Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed after CNN's Andrew Kaczynski and the KFile surface old clips of the democratic socialist calling football "toxically masculine" and tied to slavery, demanding an end to Fourth of July fireworks, floating a repeal of the Second Amendment, and promoting "feminist prison abolition," all now disowned as "cherry picked" comments from just two and three years ago. He then turns to Wisconsin, where on election day far-left gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong (one of only six votes against a bipartisan law making teacher grooming a felony, signed by Tony Evers) sits atop the Marquette poll and the Kalshi prediction markets, and to New York, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is caught on a Turkish American podcast describing the red-green "validator" playbook. A caller pushes Erick on Temporary Protected Status for Ukrainians, and he makes the case for extending it while Russia bombs Kyiv.

Erick pivots from Zohran Mamdani to the Flock camera fight, using the Manhattan Institute's Stu Smith to trace the organized opposition to license plate readers back not to civil libertarians but to the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and the defund the police and abolish prisons movements. He walks through Columbus, Ohio police chief Elaine Bryant's real case files where Flock helped solve double homicides, arrest a 15 year old murder suspect within 18 hours, recover a kidnapped three year old, and locate missing elderly people with dementia, while conceding the genuine privacy concerns raised by a listener in Jacksonville and callers from Oklahoma City and Forsyth County. He closes by dismantling Mamdani's slick anti Amazon ad as an attack on the small delivery businesses Amazon created, framing it as the politics of envy and covetousness.

Erick Erickson opens on the fight to let Ukraine build its own Patriot missiles and the Lockheed and Raytheon protectionism blocking it, as Ukraine out-produces all of NATO with five million drones this year while America makes fewer than 100,000. He ties a "sclerotic" defense industry and a stumbling Boeing to why the United States cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz or finish the job in Iran, where Tehran keeps raising its price and the promised Bessent and Rubio deal never came. Then a Milton Friedman defense of the free market against tariffs, the imaginary $20 burrito, populism as covetousness, and a surprising rethink on the Flock camera backlash.

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Erick Erickson breaks down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first big TV interview in two years, a soft sit-down with ABC's Jonathan Karl, and argues "Woke 2.0" is just the old defund-the-police, abolish-ICE agenda with the honesty stripped out. He contrasts Brian Kemp's early COVID reopening of Georgia, and the "human sacrifice" smear from The Atlantic and Anthony Fauci, with the credit Ron DeSantis got for running for president, then turns to Todd Blanche's narrow 50-vote confirmation as Attorney General. He closes on the new FIRE college free speech rankings, where 166 of 257 schools earn an F and Barnard finishes dead last.

Erick Erickson takes apart the left's redefinition of violence, playing James Talarico's claim that poverty, pollution, and prison are all "violence," then walks through a Savannah, Georgia case where a man arrested 27 times attempted to rape a homeless woman in a public restroom while Judge Claire Williams kept releasing him. He argues prisons exist to punish, not to rehabilitate, and that homelessness is really a drug addiction and mental health crisis the left refuses to treat. Then Zohran Mamdani's FDR and LaGuardia nostalgia, CNN's Harry Enten on Trump's underwater jobs approval, a DSA co-chair's word salad to David Remnick of The New Yorker, and a long monologue on why AI, Common Core, and the algorithm are making Americans less imaginative.

Erick opens Open Line Friday on the ugly July jobs report: the economy lost 23,000 jobs, average wages rose just two cents while inflation outran them, and labor force participation fell to a five-year low, with middle-aged men and young workers struggling most to get hired. He argues the sectors government controls most (housing, healthcare, education, and food) are the ones driving prices up, then turns to Donald Trump endorsing Charlie Hatcher over Andy Ogles in Tennessee, Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan Senate win, David Hogg's war on moderate Democrats, and Patrick Ruffini's data on the Democrats' summer polling mirage.

Erick breaks down Donald Trump's Punchbowl News interview with Jake Sherman, where the president insists voters are angry at other Republicans and not at him, defends tariffs and the Save America Act, wants to terminate the filibuster, and warns he could be "the last Republican president." Erick lays out the Axios warning from Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen that Trump is trapped by a war, tariffs, and monuments he never should have chased, plus a Quinnipiac record-low approval and a sub-40 percent polling average, then offers his own Labor Day fix: scrap the tariffs, finish the war with Iran, and drop the gaudy gold-leaf White House makeover. Then Open Line Friday callers on New York's $30 minimum wage, the restaurant tip credit, Milton Friedman and the free market, and why Cory Mills and Max Miller have to go.

Erick makes the case for Florida voters to throw scandal-plagued Congressman Cory Mills out of Florida's 7th District, walking through the House Ethics investigation into Mills' federal weapons contracts, the assault allegations, and the restraining order, then urging support for challenger Ryan Elijah, who trails Mills by just three points in the primary. He warns Republicans that if they will not clean up their own side, the voters will do it for them, invoking the 2006 wave that swept out Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert. Then a pair of Open Line Friday standouts: Enes Kanter Freedom declaring himself a WNBA prospect under the league's own self-identification rules, and a long free-market debate with caller Alan on why the government taking equity stakes in Intel, U.S. Steel, and IBM cannot beat China.

Erick takes on the viral "$20 burrito" affordability debate that lit up the right after a Turning Point USA student's tweet, arguing that tariffs, Fannie and Freddie loan guarantees, and the Jones Act (not lazy consumers) are what really drive prices up. He walks through Trump scrapping tariffs on coffee, bananas, beef, and eggs, and tells the story of his Rev Coffee habit and Jura machine to show tariffs in real life. Then he pivots to the Georgia governor's race, contrasting Keisha Lance Bottoms' "we don't have the facts" dodge on data centers with Rick Jackson's local-control answer, and points to Meta's El Paso project and the Hyundai plant in Bryan County as proof of the economic upside.

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Erick catches the Democratic Socialists contradicting themselves in their own words: Bernie Sanders on Pod Save America swears no serious Democrat wants to defund the police, abolish ICE, or open the borders, while Ro Khanna openly calls to abolish ICE, pack the Supreme Court from 9 to 13, and tax billionaires. He plays Wisconsin governor candidate Francesca Hong refusing on CNN to disavow her deleted 2021 "cancel Thanksgiving" tweet, then a Politico jump-cut interview where she suddenly calls Thanksgiving her favorite holiday. Add a Mike Bloomberg and Jones Act tariff callback, BMW hijacking customers' screens for a Spider-Man promo, and a caller-fueled deep dive on data center cooling and immigration.

Erick tracks the fast-collapsing Max Miller scandal as both Ohio Republican senators, his father-in-law Bernie Moreno and John Husted, now publicly call on the OH-7 congressman to quit over domestic violence and child-abuse allegations, including the bizarre "bunny" standoff and a daughter's untreated broken collarbone. He lays out the brutal math: an R+5 district against a D+8 generic ballot, where Miller staying on the ballot could sink Vivek Ramaswamy's run for governor and cost John Husted his Senate seat against Sherrod Brown, and he demands Trump push Miller out the way Democrats forced Graham Platner out in Maine. Then the blockbuster: Erick confirms a CNBC report that the Army has burned through nearly all of its ATACMS and precision-strike missiles in the five-month Iran war, walks back a false Washington Post claim of a Camp David blowup between Trump and Pete Hegseth, and warns that a China-Taiwan war is coming while Congress and the defense industrial base stall.

Erick breaks down Abdul El-Sayed's Democratic Socialist win in the Michigan Senate primary over Haley Stevens, his Morning Joe damage control on Israel, foreign aid, and abolishing ICE, and why the polls oversampled urban white voters and nearly blew the call. Then a blistering hour on Ohio Republican Max Miller, the abuse and drug allegations, father-in-law Senator Bernie Moreno calling him unfit, and how Democrats force their damaged candidates out while Republicans will not. Erick's warning: if Max Miller stays on the ballot, the GOP could lose the Ohio Senate and governor's races too.

Erick makes the case that the United States simply does not have the electrical capacity to repatriate manufacturing or feed the AI boom, walking through Scott Lincicum's Cato piece on the 1886 Hall-Heroult aluminum cell and why a single smelter needs a permanent, enormous block of base load power that nuclear, coal, and natural gas provide and solar and wind cannot. He then turns to Ross Douthat's interview with Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn, who floats overweighting young voters and handing children's proxy votes to random 20-somethings instead of their own parents, and builds it into a sweeping monologue on college educated white progressives, the 1619 Project, and universities as "progressive madrasas." Plus the Max Miller "permission structure" play and a caller on the coming generational wealth transfer.

Erick tears into the right's $20 burrito panic and the affordability fight between Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and the Turning Point USA crowd, calling out the writers in JD Vance's orbit who blame corporate greed while refusing to admit Trump's tariffs and the Iran war (not just Joe Biden) drove up grocery, beef, and gas prices, with a Reuters poll now showing Americans blame Republicans. A caller pitches a Pacific Ocean to Lake Mead desalination mega-project with nuclear-powered AI hubs, reviving Erick's Ukraine drones and precision-missile shortage capacity argument. The hour closes with a monologue on democratic socialism as a secular religion, built on Lansing socialist William Lawrence saying non-white voters "defang the white left" and Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan coalition, and Erick's answer: churchgoers should go be their isolated neighbors' friend and bring them Jesus.

Back early from vacation, Erick pulls back the curtain on what Republican pollsters, focus groupers, strategists, donors, and corporate money men are all telling him: James Talarico is leading Ken Paxton in Texas right now, and the fortune the GOP must spend to rescue Paxton could cost them Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, Haley Stevens, and Mike Rogers set up a nervous primary night. He argues the one thing saving Republicans is a Democratic Party that has lost its mind, from Wisconsin governor hopeful Francesca Hong wanting to cancel Thanksgiving as colonialism to the socialist surge terrifying the party's own establishment. Then a signature comic monologue on the Washington Post dragging JD Vance for raising backyard chickens, complete with a they/them source in Utah and a hen named Karen.

Erick argues the United States is losing to Iran by choice, driven by an isolationist wing embedded around President Trump and Vice President JD Vance that wants a "tripartite" world carved up with Russia and China, even as war torn Ukraine out builds all of NATO with 5 million drones a year while America cannot manufacture a single Patriot missile. He then hammers Ohio Republican Max Miller to drop out over the Daily Mail's syringe and marijuana gummy photos (with Senator Bernie Moreno calling it a "seventh level of hell") and calls on Florida to primary Cory Mills. The centerpiece is a deep dive into a $5 billion foreign dark money machine: Hansjorg Wyss, Christopher Hohn, the Oak and Hewlett Foundations, Indivisible, and Oren Cass funneling left wing cash into groups on both the left and a co opted "right."

Erick makes a full throated defense of America's data center boom, playing a Mike Rowe clip about Plano, Texas electricians under 30 making north of $240,000 debt free, debunking the Erin Brockovich water panic from Bill Maher's show, and explaining why Caterpillar is suddenly the hottest stock in the Dow. Callers Keith, Max, Chet the Jet, and Ed dig into the skilled trades gold rush, canteen empanada six figure incomes, and the non-disclosure agreements that are breeding data center conspiracy theories. He closes with breaking Iran news as Trump, Scott Bessent, and Marco Rubio claim progress on reopening the Strait of Hormuz while Tehran denies any talks and a cargo ship is struck off the coast of Oman.

Erick returns from a week at Lake Burton to a world still in chaos: Iran spurns peace as Trump halts strikes, the democratic socialists surge with Texas suddenly in play (James Talarico leading Ken Paxton), and New York's Zohran Mamdani demands a photo ID to buy subsidized groceries but not to vote. He connects the dots to JD Vance's post-liberal advisor Patrick Deneen, a Wall Street Journal corporate shakedown story, and a signature monologue framing socialism as a violation of the Tenth Commandment.

Back from Lake Burton, Erick breaks down Marco Rubio's Fox News interview on the funded, organized protest network tied to Cuba, China, Neville Roy Singham, and a Cox Enterprises heir, then makes the grown-up case that the left is both astroturf and real grassroots, just as the Tea Party was in 2010. He hammers Ohio's Max Miller and Florida's Cory Mills over abuse and revenge-porn allegations and demands the GOP force them out, then turns to Mike Turner on Patriot missiles for Ukraine, America's broken missile production, and a big-ideas argument for desalinating Pacific water to save Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.

Back from vacation, Erick sounds the alarm on a confirmed Wall Street Journal story about a Trump fundraiser pressing corporations like Apple for cash and doling out tariff carve-outs, warning his own side is now perceived like the Biden crime family while wages slip behind inflation and independents may just stay home in November. He then walks through his friend Josh Trevino's National Review essay on why we abandon the lessons of World War II at our peril, taking on Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper, R.R. Reno, and the post-liberalism of Patrick Deneen and JD Vance, and closes with the RedState origin story, an Apple lockout vacation saga, and a Tomahawk steak cookout.

Erick opens with a raw, personal plea for his annual childhood cancer Care-a-thon benefiting Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, sharing his wife's stage four lung cancer and the reality that some of the kids he will interview over the next 48 hours may not survive the year. He then unloads on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the progressive squad for falsely claiming the National Defense Authorization Act merges the U.S. and Israeli militaries, mounts a long defense of Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark against a hostile WNBA press, and closes by branding "post-liberalism" as socialism made cute, tracing it to Harvard's Adrian Vermeule and Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.

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